Up to 2.8 million African-Americans, mostly children, living in inner cities in the Mid-Atlantic and the South are infected with the roundworm Toxocara parasite that has been linked to asthma. And compared with white women, young black women have up to a fiftyfold greater risk of acquiring cytomegalovirus (CMV) during their pregnancy and then passing it onto their unborn babies. The resulting congenital CMV infection is a major reason why babies are born with mental retardation and deafness.
High rates of the parasitic infection trichomoniasis have also been seen in Baltimore; one study found a rate of 8.6 percent among the city's female intravenous drug users. Another study, with a larger sample size, found the disease in 97 of 337 women, a rate of 29 percent.
The high burden of neglected infections among African-Americans builds on another recent finding by the Black AIDS Institute: that rates of HIV among blacks living in the U.S. are as high as in some African countries. Together, the neglected infections and HIV/AIDS represent an important reason why minorities often cannot escape poverty.
The American public would not tolerate it if children in wealthy suburbs were subjected to these diseases. There would be a national outcry for increased measures to learn more about neglected infections and how we could prevent and treat them. Instead, because they occur almost exclusively among the poorest people in our society, most of whom are people of color, they have become forgotten diseases among forgotten people.
Both major presidential candidates are working to establish robust policies for health care reform that include increasing access, lowering costs and improving quality. We also need a national dialogue about these neglected infections that makes cysticercosis, Chagas disease, toxocariasis and congenital CMV infection household words.
Expanded national efforts are needed to determine the full extent of these neglected infections and then to find ways to prevent them, either with existing methods or by developing new drugs, diagnostics and vaccines. This initiative should involve the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and major academic institutions such as the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
We need to take measures - soon - to eliminate this most glaring of health disparities.
Dr. Peter Hotez is president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Walter G. Ross professor and chair of microbiology, immunology and tropical medicine at George Washington University. His e-mail is mtmpjh@gwumc.edu.
