Dengue fever, river blindness, schistosomiasis or trachoma – have you ever heard of it? Many tropical diseases are hardly known in this country. And they hardly have a lobby with us, even though they claim thousands of lives worldwide. According to the German Network against Neglected Tropical Diseases, 1.9 billion people worldwide are exposed to these diseases. In an emergency, however, many of them cannot afford medical treatment at all. Anyone who becomes infected therefore threatens to go blind, live with disfigurement or disabilities, or even die.
“The neglected tropical diseases are silent, but they cause enormous personal suffering,” reports Sid Johann Peruvemba, board member of action medeor. “And unfortunately we don’t just forget about diseases. In reality, it’s the people we forget and who suffer and die unnoticed,” Peruvemba explains. He knows what he is talking about, because as the “emergency pharmacy of the world” action medeor from Tönisvorst in Lower Rhine supplies people worldwide with medicines and medical equipment. The Lower Rhine people are also active in the fight against neglected tropical diseases, for example by delivering medication for the eye disease trachoma to the affected areas. “Treatment with antibiotic eye ointment can be enough to save people from going blind,” says Peruvemba. These are small measures that make a big difference.
Many diseases can already be treated preventively, for example by supplying entire village communities with medication. “Such preventive mass treatment has been very successful in fighting river blindness in Africa and Latin America, for example,” says Peruvemba. According to Peruvemba, it is not only vaccination campaigns and medication that are important in the fight against neglected tropical diseases. Improving the hygiene situation, water and sanitation also helps to curb tropical diseases. “It is about the general strengthening of the health sector in the poorer countries of the south – that is the real issue that we have to take care of,” said the action-medeor board.
Peruvemba believes that all of this is not that far away, especially today: “The spread of the corona virus shows that diseases in other corners of the world can also come to us very quickly. In a globalized world there is health a global issue that concerns us all. ” But something else is even more crucial for the action-medeor board: “It’s more than just prevention and treatment,” says Peruvemba. “It’s about the question of how we deal with each other in a humanitarian way. Neglected tropical diseases are silent. But that is precisely why they shed light on how we define and behave in the world.”
Press contact:
action medeor
Dr. Markus Bremers
[email protected]
02156 / 9788-178
0152/540 421 56
Original content by: action medeor, transmitted by news aktuell
Original message: https://www.presseportal.de/pm/31394/4505778
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