Neglected Tropical Diseases

Lord Stone of Blackheath Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a shame that we have to use the term “neglected”, but yes, ever since I joined the advisory board of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative—SCI—I have found that whenever I mention schistosomiasis to friends and acquaintances they say, “What? What’s that?”. First, I explain the scale, that over 260 million people in the world need treatment for schistosomiasis and 120 million of these are of school age, and then, as noble Lords all know, that schistosomiasis causes malnutrition and anaemia in children and blood in their urine; if untreated, it goes on to cause liver fibrosis and bladder cancer; and female genital schistosomiasis increases the risk of HIV. I can only think that the world neglects such diseases because over 90% of these cases are in sub-Saharan Africa. However, wherever these diseases exist, their effects are appalling.

I myself come at this not as a medic, an academic or someone working in an NGO but as a businessperson seeing the numbers and the cost-effectiveness of compassion. Reaching out to treat these young children before the worms cause this extensive damage costs less than 50p per treatment per child per year. However, the recent “scorecards” show that schistosomiasis is lagging behind in coverage, and programmes targeting the intestinal worms still have a long way to go to reach the World Health Organization’s target of annual treatment with 75% coverage of children at school age. This can be rectified. We have had generous help from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, philanthropists such as Luke Ding through Prism the Gift Fund, the END Fund and, of course, DfID.

Along with this, SCI, which is centred at Imperial College, provides the drugs, microscopes, training materials, vehicles and other transport and ensures that the programmes are managed efficiently. As has been said, the pharmaceutical companies Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson have generously offered to donate all the drugs that are needed to treat 100 million children with praziquantel every year against schistosomiasis and 600 million with deworming pills.

Where, then, is the problem? As was said, it is in delivery that there needs to be help. To treat children in schools, working with local governments, SCI has built a network in 11 countries. This network is set up, but in many of these countries many of the children are simply not at school. Delivery to these outlying children is vital.

The world can afford to help. The economics of the case are that, each and every year, 50 million years’ work is lost through people’s disability resulting from NTDs. Were these people well and able to contribute fully to their society, even at just $1 a day, as my noble friend Lady Warwick said, in each of these countries, this would mean an extra $18 billion a year for the African economy.

I urge the Minister to follow up this excellent debate with a meeting of DfID with the expert people working on this at Imperial College, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and Sightsavers, so we could see how we might allocate more money to those who are already implementing treatment to millions of children so that they may treble their coverage in the next five years to have a chance, as was said, of eliminating these diseases in many more countries.

Dealing with these NTDs in this way could change the world immensely for the better. It would give these young girls and boys a better future, help their countries begin to thrive and thence would add $18 billion a year to the wealth of their continent and, therefore, to the world’s economy. I thank noble Lords.