Adriana Pereira da Silva's family and friends are a weary lot who spend their days coaxing whatever crops they can from the red dirt that surrounds their thatch-roofed shacks. It's a tough life, which Pereira da Silva assumed was why so many people seemed perpetually worn out.
But another explanation hides in the dirt itself: Up to 80 percent of the people in her village are infected with hookworm, a vitality-sapping parasite that crawls up from the ground, penetrates the skin and settles in the intestines.
"People seem tired all the time, and they never eat," said Pereira da Silva, a nurse who lives in Americanias, a small village here in Minas Gerais state, in eastern Brazil. "They don't know what's wrong with them."
The global health community has known for a long time about the wide-ranging complications that hookworm causes, but pharmaceutical companies have had little incentive to develop a vaccine: Most of those infected are too poor ever to pay for medicine, so recovering expensive development costs would be a long shot.
But now the medical ghetto of neglected diseases -- the field concerned with ailments affecting the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day -- is undergoing a transformation, thanks to an influx of cash from wealthy philanthropists and an emerging development model that promotes public-private partnerships.
The project has been made possible with grants totaling more than $53 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, along with other donors such as the Rockefeller Foundation and Doctors Without Borders, has in recent years provided the financial incentive to get several such ventures off the ground.
[Excerpt of article by Monte Reel, The Washington Post]
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