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Disease Prevention and Control / Communicable Diseases / Parasitic and Neglected Diseases

Neglected Diseases: Search Page for PAHO and WHO Information

nature special issue

New!   Special Issue nature outlook: Neglected Diseases



NTDs

Tentative list of
neglected1 tropical2 diseases
(NTDs) of importance in
Latin America and the Caribbean, with search links, published by the PAHO Regional Program on Parasitic and Neglected Diseases

PAHO is developing a multi-disease approach to the prevention, control, or elimination of most of the diseases in this area. Information on them can be accessed as follows:

I. PAHO/WHO Health Topic Pages: WHO has its own page for Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD). For some of these diseases or disease groups, PAHO and/or WHO have special pages that summarize and organize materials; and the WHO site for the Special Programme for Research and Training on Tropical Diseases (TDR) provides special coverage for certain priority diseases (with summarized disease information sheets and information on current global prevention, control and elimination strategies), as follows:

  • Buruli Ulcer (Mycobacterium ulcerans): WHO
  • Chagas Disease / American Trypanosomiasis (Trypanosoma cruzi; not considered neglected in some countries): PAHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Filariasis: PAHO   |   WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Hantavirus: PAHO
  • Leishmaniasis: PAHO   |   WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Leprosy (Hansen's disease) (Mycobacterium leprae): PAHO |   WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Leptospirosis: WHO
  • Lymphatic Filariasis: PAHO   |   WHO (Elephantiasis, filarial)   |   WHO/TDR
  • Onchocerciasis / River Blindness (Onchocerca volvulus): WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Parasitic Diseases: PAHO   |   WHO
  • Plague: WHO
  • Schistosomiasis: WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Trachoma (Chlamydia trachomatis): WHO
  • Tropical Disease Research: WHO   |   WHO/TDR
  • Viral Hemorrhagic diseases (other than dengue hemorrhagic fever / DHF; status as neglected under discussion): WHO

II. Unsorted Searches: Information on other diseases can be found according to the following scheme:

  1. Clicking on a disease/parasite/topic name will run a basic search links on the PAHO web, where documents appear in an unsorted list.
  2. If the link is labelled as PAHO, WHO, or WHO/TDR, it will lead to the topic page on the respective website, where the documents are sorted into coherent categories (as was shown above, with the same information included here for the sake of convenience).
  3. Neither method, however, is meant to replace a full and detailed advanced search on the WHO website. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States are also a valuable source of information, which is organized in a similar way to PAHO and WHO by health topic and with advanced search mechanisms.
Diseases are listed by category as follows:

Bacterial infections

Parasitic Protozoa

Parasitic Nematodes (roundworms)

Parasitic Trematodes (flatworms)

Parasitic Cestodes (tapeworms)

Parasitic Fungi and Ectoparasitic Arthropods

Viral

1 Brazil does not consider any infectious disease in its territory as neglected but does recognize the existence of diseases of poverty in its territory.
2 WHO includes the majority of the diseases on this page under the heading of neglected tropical diseases. Plague and hantavirus, however, are not strictly tropical diseases.
3 The endemic (non-venereal) treponematoses are yaws (T. pallidum subsp. pertenue), endemic syphilis (T. pallidum subsp. endemicum) and pinta (T. carateum).