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Nine promising technologies have the ability to enhance Africa’s response to neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) amid socio-political instability, a paper published in Nature Communications, November 27, 2024 stated.
The paper examined the interplay between NTDs and sociopolitical instability in Africa and looked at innovative technologies in the NTD sector that Africa can leverage amidst such instability.
The systematic review led by Tsegahun Manyazewal at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University, identified 46 relevant studies examining technologies for their potential in preventing, predicting, surveilling, diagnosing, treating and managing NTDs.
Classified by technology type, the studies investigated nine innovative technologies: Artificial Intelligence, drones, mobile clinics, nanotechnology, telemedicine, augmented reality, advanced point-of-care diagnostics, mobile health solutions and wearable sensors.
African ministries of health should assess the feasibility of implementing these technologies within their specific contexts, incorporating them into their National NTD Masterplans, and actively participating in the ongoing dialogue regarding their translation into health systems.
As stability gradually returns, the technologies could transition to supporting more comprehensive healthcare services, thereby laying the groundwork for sustainable health developments, the study suggested.
The systematic review demonstrated that AI holds significant promise in the NTDs sector for rapid and accurate NTD diagnosis, predicting and analysing potential NTD outbreaks and vector dynamics and enhancing case management and patient retention in hard-to-reach and underdeveloped areas.
Findings of the review revealed that drones can enhance NTD surveillance by including local communities, facilitate detection of NTD vectors in hard-to-reach areas like rivers and streams and provide efficient and timely delivery of time-sensitive essential products such as blood in African contexts.
The review also highlighted the vital role of mobile clinic technology in the NTDs sector for early detection and treatment of patients, as well as identifying new cases in non-endemic areas, thereby contributing to the elimination of NTDs and the goals of the NTD 2030 Roadmap.
NTDs result in severe health, economic, and social consequences, affecting over one billion individuals annually. The WHO NTDs Roadmap 2030 endeavors to address these challenges, but countries grappling with simultaneous sociopolitical and NTD challenges face substantial barriers to achieving roadmap goals.
Countries in Africa facing sociopolitical instability bear a high burden of NTDs, with the continent ranking second globally in NTD burden (33 per cent, 578 million people) and first in internal displacement (50 per cent, 31.6 million people) in 2023.
Various studies have investigated technologies for their potential in NTD prevention, surveillance, diagnosis, treatment and management.
Innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and nanotechnology are evolving rapidly and they attract the attention of Ministries of Health, global partners, academia, and research institutions. There is a focused effort to investigate their potential contributions in eradicating, managing, preventing, diagnosing, monitoring, and treating a range of diseases and health conditions.
For NTDs, efforts are underway to harness the abovementioned technologies and these efforts are aimed to address NTDs that have historically been overlooked by the global health community.
Significant efforts have been placed towards decentralising NTD diagnostics, allowing testing to take place closer to NTD-affected populations rather than relying on distant laboratories.
The WHO released the Target Product Profile Directory, a free-to-use online database to improve the efficiency of efforts to develop new products for neglected diseases and populations as well as threats to global health. It provides an accessible database of characteristics used to describe desired health products, including medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and medical equipment.