NALA Foundation teams up with Ethiopian Health Ministry and pharmaceutical giant Merck to help eradicate neglected tropical diseases including “snail fever” in Ethiopia.
By Brian Blum (ISRAEL21c)
More than 80 percent of schoolchildren in the Bench Maji zone of southwest Ethiopia are affected by schistosomiasis, commonly known as “snail fever.” The disease is caused by parasitic flatworms and can infect the urinary tract and intestines.
Schistosomiasis is treatable with medication and changes in infrastructure and behavior, such as the availability and use of clean water and toilets. Getting that combination into rural Ethiopia has been a decade-long challenge for the NALA Foundation.
This week, NALA, which was founded by renowned Israeli immunologist Dr. Zvi Bentwich, signed a three-year partnership with pharmaceutical giant Merck, which has donated more than 19 million praziquantel tablets in Ethiopia since 2007, helping some seven million children to fight the disease.
The agreement acknowledges that meds alone cannot stop the spread of schistosomiasis.
“It took us 10 years to develop a model of behavioral change,” Bentwich tells ISRAEL21c. But once the model was in place, it was Merck that came knocking on the door.
“They said to us, ‘We are now convinced that just giving medication is not enough. We have to combine drug administration with health education,’” Bentwich explains.
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The agreement with Merck includes a critical third party: The Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health, which is taking NALA’s behavioral model nationwide.
“We will eventually be all over the country,” Bentwich says. “That’s hundreds of millions of people in Ethiopia. Eventually this will expand to other countries.” Cameroon looks to be next.
NALA’s behavioral approach may sound obvious – it involves such basics as teaching children to wash their hands, use the toilet rather than the field as a bathroom and not to expose themselves to dirty water – but to create lasting change, all of society needs to be recruited to the mission.
Read the complete story at ISRAEL21c