Schistosomiasis & NTD Control

Mission and Goals

The mission of the SCI is to help those who suffer from and are at risk of NTDs in sub-Saharan Africa. We aim to achieve this by:

• Creating awareness, changing perceptions and fostering global support for National NTD Programmes;
• Promoting effective collaboration and developing key partnerships in order to mobilize resources against NTDs;
• Empowering governments to run successful and sustainable National NTD Control Programmes;
• Ensuring universal access to effective treatment to everyone who suffers from NTDs;
• Building the capacity of civil society and affected communities to break the cycle of transmission;
• Developing and deploying a new generation of improved preventative and therapeutic tools and strategies to eliminate NTD.

The goal of the SCI is to reduce the global disease burden of NTDs in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015 in accordance with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of sustainable poverty reduction (www.un.org/millenniumgoals/goals.html).

In order to achieve this we need to control and eliminate these diseases as public health problems, hence improve childhood development, school attendance and performance, pregnancy outcomes, and worker productivity among the world's poorest populations.

This can be achieved through the development of health education, appropriate administrative infrastructure, technical competence, and monitoring and evaluation methods within the countries affected by NTDs. Once these systems are in place regular drug treatment, either annually or as appropriate, in order to decrease the disease burden of the affected population to a level where it is no longer classed as a public health problem, can be provided.

© Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 2008

Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology
Imperial College London, St Mary's Campus, Norfolk Place, London W2 1PG

email: schisto@imperial.ac.uk