Neglected Tropical Diseases and “The Other America”

The other day, I ran across this analysis of income distribution (posted here and here), which quantifies the class war that has been declared on most Americans. It shows 80 percent of Americans have been steadily losing ground financially over the past 25 years, with the people at the top 1% of the income distribution making out like bandits.

It’s interesting to lay that observation alongside a recent editorial in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) journal, Neglected Tropical Diseases, which suggests that large numbers of the poorest Americans suffer from the same diseases as low-income peoples in Africa, Asia and Central America.

The popular conception of parasitic tropical diseases consisted of hookworm infestations, which combined with pellagra and malaria, sapped the intellect and vitality of poor rural Southerners for generations until the New Deal “transformed the region from an economy based on subsistence agriculture into an urbanized one with higher wage earning and improved quality dwellings”. Hookworm is no longer considered endemic in the U.S., though this hasn’t been studied recently. Other parasitic diseases that have been recently studied include toxocariasis, which might be linked to the prevalence of asthma in poor black and Hispanic children, cysticercosis, which is emerging as the leading cause of epilepsy among Hispanics in Los Angeles County and toxoplasmosis, which poses risks of mental retardation, and hearing and vision losses to newborns of black and Hispanic mothers.

The closing sentence in the NTD editorial says it best, “There are no excuses for allowing such glaring health disparities to persist in one of the world's wealthiest countries.”