Neglected Tropical Diseases
A group of disabling infections affecting more than a billion people and attracting little funding.
Severity score
38.4
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Improving
What this is
Diseases such as schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, Chagas and leishmaniasis cause blindness, disfigurement and lifelong disability rather than mass mortality, which is precisely why they are underfunded. Mass drug administration works and is chronically short of money.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
32Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
84People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
26Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
4Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
20Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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