From Colonial Diseases to Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs): Historicizing the Current Moment in Global Health

Attention to neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has recently exploded among organizing efforts in global health.  NTDs are a source of debility, blindness, death, inequality, and stigma for men and women in affected communities.  Women and girls, in particular, are targeted both as useful community health workers and as a cohort whose fortunes will change as NTDs disappear.  Of the seventeen diseases currently slated for eradication or elimination between 2015 and 2020, all ostensibly benefit in the present from their past exclusion from public health programs.   But scholars of colonial medicine, history, and international health demonstrate that these 21^st century NTDs, ranging from Chagas disease in the Americas to river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa, have long had social and political importance in their local contexts. They are also scientific and social entities that represent operative and imaginative categories in global health – they, too, have politics, and those politics have a history.  This paper examines current NTD work and explores the importance of transnational flows of information, expertise, and pharmaceutical goods in shaping NTDs as a category for global health intervention.  It queries how partnerships crucial to drug delivery or environmental intervention function on the ground. Countering the predominantly future-oriented discourse of global health programs, comparing recent interventions aimed at sleeping sickness in Tanzania and river blindness in Uganda emphasizes continuities in modes of intervention and framings of disease across the past century, and explores how current categorization of diseases as NTDs open up or limit our understandings of their specific and diverse histories.