Harriet Washington has written a very scary article in the American Scholar. It's about tropical diseases, which she asserts are no longer restricted to the Tropics, they are here now and, unless we do something, they will really flourish.
Currently, those most affected by these diseases are the poor. At least 330,000 U.S. citizens have Chagas disease, the most common parasitic disease in the Americas, and estimates range as high as one million. It infects six million to seven million more people in Latin America. It can be treated, but the lack of awareness by doctors in the United States means that it often isn’t.
It appears that tropical diseases have more than straightforward physical effects; they also undermine intellectual development. They affect our ability to calculate, to focus, and to process visual information. While we made a big deal about Ebola, about 11,000 people have died from Ebola in sub-Saharan Africa, but 10 million people—nearly half the population of these countries—suffer from at least one NTD or malaria or both.
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