Among the many bills passed by the House and stuck in the Senate is a bill that would require the secretary of Health and Human Services to track America's forgotten diseases, which mostly still affect isolated and poor communities, and recommend funding for eradicating them. The diseases include parasitic and viral diseases that can cause everything from vision and hearing loss to asthma, but the extent to which they still exist isn't entirely known.
These diseases don't get a lot of funding because they aren't rampaging through middle-class, white suburbs, to paraphrase Peter Hotez, a microbiologist at George Washington University, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Sabin Vaccine Institute and co-founder of the institute’s Global Network for Neglected Tropical Disease Control, who is quoted in the piece. For the same reason, it doesn't seem the bill has a high-profile champion. But untreated disease is one of the problems of poverty that helps perpetuate poverty: One of the greatest public-health triumphs of the past century was helping to eradicate ringworm infections throughout the South. But there has to be focused attention on doing it, and since the public-health fight on the horizon is most likely repealing the bill that would help extend health care to lower-income working people, that attention doesn't seem forthcoming.
-- Monica Potts
