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U.S. Poor Suffer From Neglected Infectious Diseases

Posted on: Wednesday, 25 June 2008, 12:10 CDT

Diseases brought about by bacterial, viral and parasitic infections are harming the health and energy of millions of the nation's poor, according to a new report released this week.  Many of the diseases are typically associated with developing countries, such as Chagas disease and dengue fever, but are also common in poor regions of the United States, the researchers reported.

These may even become a bigger problem for the United States as the climate changes, said Dr. Peter Hotez of George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute in Washington.

"The message is a little tough because they are not killer diseases -- they impact on child development, intellectual development, hearing and sometimes even heart disease," Hotez said during a Reuters telephone interview.

The diseases, he said, serve to trap people in poverty, since infections may last years, decades or even entire lifetimes.

"Throughout the American South during the early twentieth century, malaria combined with hookworm infection and pellagra (a vitamin deficiency) to produce a generation of anemic, weak, and unproductive children and adults," Hotez wrote in his report, adding that the parasitic diseases are having similar effects now.

In writing his report, published in the journal Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, for which he serves as editor, Hotez reviewed nine diseases affecting at least 10 million Americans.

"These diseases occur predominantly in people of color living in the Mississippi Delta and elsewhere in the American South, in disadvantaged urban areas, and in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as well as in certain immigrant populations and disadvantaged white populations living in Appalachia," he wrote.

The diseases include ascariasis, the most common human worm infection, caused by an intestinal parasite.  In 1974 it infected just under 4 million people in Appalachia and the South, according to the last survey.

Hotez said that toxocariasis, a roundworm parasite transmitted in dog droppings, infected up 2.8 million poor black children in inner cities, the South and Appalachia.  These parasites can cause intestinal illness and blindness, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and infects up to 14 percent of the U.S. population.

Strongyloidiasis, caused by a threadworm that lives throughout the body and can cause hyper-immune reactions, and infects 68,000 to 100,000 people each year.   Hotez said Cysticercosis, brought about by pork tapeworm, and giardiasis, a diarrheal illness caused by a one-celled parasite, are also common. 

Cytomegalovirus is a particular threat to babies, with 27,002 newborns infected each year, sometimes causing mental retardation and deafness.

Dengue, which has been reported in Texas, is carried by mosquitoes, and can sometimes cause a deadly hemorrhagic fever.

"It's amazing what we tolerate," Hotez told Reuters, adding that the U.S. spends $1 billion a year preparing for outbreaks of diseases, such as anthrax, smallpox and avian flu, that have not yet occurred.

"But these (other) diseases are occurring among voiceless people," he said.

"It's an unintended form of racism in a sense. We need to make these disease household words."

“Chagas disease, caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, infects as many as 8 to 11 million people in Latin America and may become a U.S. threat,” Hotez said.

"In Louisiana, almost 30 percent of the armadillos and 38 percent of the opossums are infected with T. cruzi, and a case of Chagas disease was recently reported in post-Katrina New Orleans," he wrote.

"In the coming decade, global warming and increased flooding in the region could combine to promote dengue and Chagas disease epidemics among the poor in Louisiana."

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On the Net:

PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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