Neglected Diversity Stories
This week a report was released revealing that a large number of impoverished Americans are suffering from some of the same parasitic infections that affect those in underdeveloped countries, such as Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In the report, “Neglected Diseases and Poverty in ‘The Other America’: The Greatest Health Disparity in the United States,” published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, illustrated that those affected by these parasitic infections were underrepresented minority populations living in inner cities and poor rural areas.
These so-called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) included a parasitic infection, called toxocariasis, which causes lung disease and is striking inner city African-American and Hispanic children. Another NTD is toxoplasmosis, which causes congenital birth defects among African-Americans and Mexican-Americans.
Author Peter Hotez, a professor at George Washington University and president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, said in his report: “Because these parasitic infections only occur among impoverished people and mostly underrepresented minorities in the U.S., I believe that there has been a lack of political will to study the problem. It is easier to allow these diseases of poverty to simply remain neglected."
Hotez made a good point. While there may indeed be a lack of political will to investigate the dilemma, there also seems to be a lack of media attention to the problem as well. Is it because it affects underrepresented minorities only? This raises the underlying question: why?
When I searched to see if this report had been written about in the mainstream media, it was few and far between. There’s a wealth of diversity stories out there, including this one, which shouldn’t be neglected just as these tropical diseases are.
Gwendolyn Mariano