Synopsis

“The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference” (Elie Wiesel). Neglected tropical diseases (“NTDs”) are a group of diverse infectious diseases that afflict the poorest of the poor, and efforts to curb their effects have been hampered by indifference. The NTDs are frequently chronic and debilitating diseases, and contribute to an ongoing cycle of poverty through their negative effects on human health, their economic impact on families and through stigmatisation. Around the time of the launch of the Millennium Development Goals, a global movement began that aimed to control and even eventually eliminate the NTDs. Much progress has been made since that time with large and highly effective programmes established in many low and middle income countries, with ongoing support from several major non-governmental organisations as well as individual governments themselves. A key feature of these control programmes has been implementation of mass drug administration as a central component. Although a latecomer to the NTD movement, scabies is a classic NTD and recent evidence produced by Andrew and his group suggest that mass drug administration may be a highly effective strategy for control of the disease at a public health level, although a number of challenges lie ahead. Andrew will chart the history of the NTD movement, describe the NTDs themselves, introduce scabies as a NTD and discuss future public health and research priorities to advance global control of scabies.

Speaker

Associate Professor Andrew Steer is a consultant paediatrician and infectious diseases physician in the Department of General Medicine at The Royal Children’s Hospital; principal research fellow at the Centre for International Child Health in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Melbourne; and group leader of the Group A Streptococcal Research Group at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. He is also a founding committee member of the International Alliance for the Control of Scabies. A/Prof Steer’s research interests are epidemiology and control of tropical childhood skin diseases particularly scabies; group A streptococcal clinical and molecular epidemiology; group A streptococcal vaccine research; and rheumatic heart disease pathogenesis, epidemiology and control. He also enjoys swimming long distances in the ocean.