Neglected Tropical Diseases

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Monday 3rd April 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on what she said at the commencement of this special debate. I endorse everything she said 100%. We have had many battles in the past but on this issue we agree completely. I have many interests in this field but I want to focus mainly, as a long-term supporter and as a patron of WaterAid, on the critical role of water and sanitation in helping to defeat NTDs.

First, I pay tribute to Barbara Frost, the chief executive of WaterAid, who is to retire in the coming months after more than 10 notable years as its head. Much of what has come into the WASH programme and into other considerations, could not have occurred but for her leadership and her team’s work and we should put on record our thanks to her. She has been totally relentless in what she has done to get increased action to supply clean water and basic sanitation, not just through our own department’s programme, which has been notable, but also in other countries’ programmes which were not as well led as the water and sanitation programmes led by DfID in this country.

One question I want to ask my noble friend is whether the Ross fund can be extended to some of the further work that needs to be done to get better water engineering, which is essential to the supply of clean water. It seems to me that we know what needs to be done, but the resources are very often at the end of the pipe, rather than at the beginning of the process. I believe that we should be paying more attention to this.

There is one further area of work that I hope DfID will undertake. We are doing very well indeed, with the help of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where I was proud to be the chairman for eight years, and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where I was on the council. But we are not doing enough on basic health training for doctors in countries where the NTDs are still thriving. We need to focus, with the royal colleges, on better training in-country for the doctors of the countries that suffer the NTDs. We are doing insufficient work in that field. Much as we try, it is certainly not reaching many of the doctors who are practising, when it is accepted knowledge in this country and many other developed countries.

I do not wish to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, or anyone else in the debate said, but I believe that we should have not just an annual repeat of our efforts but more frequent debates on these vital subjects. Healthy societies in the developing world help the education of the young in the developing world. They cannot have those healthy societies if they continue to have the amount of illness caused by NTDs and, indeed, dirty water. I hope my noble friend will be able to give us some hope of more activity.