It’s the global health world’s ultimate goal: disease elimination. After the eradication of smallpox in 1979, the global health community set its sights on several other deadly diseases, including polio, TB, and malaria. Comprehensively beating diseases like these is a…

Forget wiping them out with insecticides—modified mosquitoes could actually help control dengue, according to new research presented at #TropMed19. Usually, mosquitoes pick up dengue from biting infected people. But mosquitoes bred to carry the Wolbachia bacteria stopped…

Fed up that pneumonia—curable and highly preventable—kills a child every 39 seconds, a collection of 6 health agencies issued a joint call for governments to act.   Last year, 800,000 children died from pneumonia. Yet despite causing 15% of deaths in children under 5, it…

Underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed? Easily cured or everlasting? Lyme disease is a tricky flashpoint for discordant groups of physicians and patients. The controversies are widely covered—what’s really needed, says editor Pamela Weintraub, is a spotlight on potentially game-…

Smallpox is the only human pathogen has ever been eradicated; guinea worm was set to be the second by 2020—until now.WHO has “quietly” rolled back that target to 2030, reports Leslie Roberts.   The horrifically painful parasite, known to live in…

Life at 5100 meters comes with a host of challenges, but in Peru's La Rinconada, it's the thin air—just half the oxygen as at sea level—that interests scientists.  The world’s highest human settlement, La Rinconada is the global capital of chronic mountain sickness, a…

More than 220 million people worldwide suffer from schistosomiasis, and the infection is well known in the global health community.

Later this month, Malawi will submit evidence to the WHO that it has eliminated lymphatic filariasis, meaning its prevalence has fallen below 1%.   The parasite causes the debilitating, stigmatizing elephantiasis and excessive scrotal swelling in men—and in 2003 was endemic…

A $2 on-the-spot diagnostic test could reinvigorate efforts to fight yaws—a “forgotten disease.”   Affecting thousands of the world’s poorest children, the bacterial skin disease causes lesions and ulcers all over the body. Left untreated, its victims become disabled and…

Start the clock. After 24 hours, some 7,400 people will have been bitten by snakes, and 220 to 380 of them will die.  That means 81,000 to 138,000 deaths every year. And 400,000 serious injuries such as amputations. But those are just estimates. No one knows how many…