On 7th July 2022, the House of Lords debated the question of global control of malaria and neglected tropical diseases. The Bishop of St Albans spoke in the debate:
The Lord Bishop of St Albans: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Trees, for obtaining this important debate on a subject that really needs to be before your Lordships’ House more frequently and deserves a much higher profile. This is a topic of some interest to me because one of my colleagues, the Bishop of Hertford—last week, he became the Bishop of Bath and Wells—is a professional epidemiologist. I hope that he will be in this House in a few years, because he has spent a lot of his time—even though he has been a bishop—in Africa working on a variety of things such as malaria and Ebola. Thanks to him, I have become increasingly aware of just how important this area is and, as we come out of Covid, how vital it is that we grow human capital in these regions.
It was said to me that rather than calling them “neglected tropical diseases” it would be more apt to call them “tropical diseases of neglected peoples”, given the global economic status of their victims. While I am conscious that malaria is specifically referenced in this debate and that NTDs include a host of serious bacterial and viral infections, I want to focus my brief comments on the parasitical infections within the NTD umbrella, as these are really diseases of poverty. Parasitical infections such as worms are in many cases caught because of the social context in which people are living—poor sanitary conditions, lack of clean water and the inability to store or consume food safely. It is therefore no surprise that deworming programmes are a huge part of the global effort to combat NTDs.
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