BRIEFING

Dr. Peter Hotez’s Research Explores Connection Between Poverty and Disease

Dr. Peter Hotez has made a career out of promoting awareness of the diseases that affect the world’s poorest people. His research on the discovery and development of vaccines to treat disabling diseases like human hookworm infection is at the intersection of medicine, international development, and policy. This international approach makes Dr. Hotez, professor and chair of GW’s Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine, a natural fit for the Elliott School.

Dr. Hotez, who is also president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, focuses on an area widely ignored by financial backers, the media, and the public: NTDs, or neglected tropical diseases. According to The Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, about half of the world’s population is affected by at least one NTD. That group is primarily composed of the world’s poorest, who survive on less than $2 a day. “The greatest impact of these diseases,” according to The Global Network’s website, “is the way they promote poverty, [and] stigmatize, disable, and inhibit individuals from being able to care for themselves or their families.”

At the Global Health Leaders Forum last December, Dr. Hotez discussed the challenges of raising funds to fight disabling, but low-fatality NTDs, when diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, kill at much higher rates and receive more public attention. “As the neglected tropical disease guy, I have a difficult message to deliver,” Dr. Hotez said in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University, “The HIV guys talk about millions of people dying. I don’t have those kinds of numbers, because these diseases don’t kill. So how do I get these diseases some level of attention?”

In his research, Dr. Hotez has found that conditions such as hookworm and schistosomiasis, a disease caused by certain flatworms, can render adult victims unable to work and children unable to learn and grow. Such diseases, he says, “represent the major reason why the poorest people in developing regions of sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and tropical regions of the Americas (especially Brazil) remain mired in poverty.”

A frequent commentator in the news on the relationship between disease and poverty and author or co-author of more than 120 scientific and technical papers on molecular and immunoparasitology and tropical disease, Dr. Hotez is doing his best to raise awareness about NTDs.

In 2006, Dr. Hotez served on a panel discussion with former President Jimmy Carter and George Stephanopolous, Washington correspondent for ABC News, at the Clinton Global Initiative to discuss the links between neglected tropical diseases and international development and foreign policy.

Dr. Hotez sees hopeful signs on the horizon if lawmakers and medical researchers can team up to fight tropical disease. “We have an opportunity to launch a serious control effort for NTDs,” he said, stressing the importance of linking NTDs with other efforts already in place, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, as well as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. “We also have important links between the [study of] NTDs at GW and collaborations with our Foggy Bottom neighbors, the World Bank, Pan American Health Organization, Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, and others.”