Communicable Diseases Programme

It strives to achieve a sustainable impact on health by providing normative guidance, furthering the implementation of evidence-based interventions, and fostering alliances that strengthen country capacity, improve the effectiveness of inter-country collaboration, and facilitate policy and decision making processes through improved health information coverage, analysis and quality at all levels.

Communicable Disease Programme is part of

Objectives: To strengthen the capacity of endemic countries to undertake research aimed at developing new or improved preventive and control strategies of infectious diseases. To foster research effort on infectious diseases of poverty in the form of grants to researchers. To promote implementation research, and the translation of innovation to health impact in disease endemic countries of the American region

Target Population: Researchers, African countries, Institutions such as universities, disease-control programs or other government entities involved with research and disease prevention and control

he Communicable Diseases and Health Analysis Department promotes, coordinates, and implements technical cooperation activities directed toward the surveillance, prevention, control, and elimination of communicable diseases and zoonosis.

It strives to achieve a sustainable impact on health by providing normative guidance, furthering the implementation of evidence-based interventions, and fostering alliances that strengthen country capacity, improve the effectiveness of inter-country collaboration, and facilitate policy and decision making processes through improved health information coverage, analysis and quality at all levels.

HIV, STI, TB

Technical Unit provides technical cooperation to the countries to:

• Reduce the transmission of and the morbidity and mortality related to HIV, STI, TB and Viral hepatitis through strengthening and expansion of strategies for prevention, early diagnosis and appropriate treatment of these infections.
• Fostering of a supportive environment for outreach to key populations disproportionately affected by these diseases, including LGBT communities, sex workers, prison populations, persons who use drugs, indigenous populations, and afro-descendants, through advocacy, capacity building, and fostering of community involvement.
• Promote and support the establishment of mechanisms for the generation, dissemination and use of strategic information.

Neglected (‘forgotten’) diseases are a set of infectious diseases, many of them parasitic, that primarily affect the most vulnerable populations. These populations include the poorest of the poor, the most marginalized, and those with the least access to health services, especially impoverished people living in remote rural areas and urban shantytowns. Dealing with these poverty-related diseases requires a more integrated and multi-disease approach that includes multisectoral action, piggy-backed initiatives, and cost-effective interventions to reduce the negative impacts that these diseases have on the health, social, and economic well-being of all people in the Americas.

Neglected tropical diseases

Recognising also the diversity of neglected tropical diseases, their causative agents and relevant vectors and intermediate hosts, their epidemic potential (such as for dengue, human rabies of canine origin and leishmaniasis), and their morbidity, mortality and associated stigmatization,

AHO Programme action:

(1) to ensure continued country ownership of programmes for neglected tropical disease prevention, control, elimination and eradication;

(2) to further strengthen the disease surveillance system especially on neglected tropical diseases targeted for eradication;

(3) to expand and implement, as appropriate, interventions against neglected tropical diseases in order to reach the targets agreed in the Africa Plan to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases 2020–2030, as set out in WHO’s roadmap for accelerating work to overcome the global impact of neglected tropical diseases and noting the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases by;

(a) ensuring that resources match national requirements and flow in a sustainable

manner as a result of thorough planning and costing of prevention and control activities and detailed analysis of associated expenditures;

(b) enabling improvement of the management of the supply chain, in particular

through forecasting, timely procurement of quality-assured goods, improved

stock-management systems, and facilitating importation and customs clearance;

(c) integrating neglected tropical diseases control programmes into primary health care

services and vaccination campaigns, or into existing programmes where feasible, in order to achieve greater coverage and reduce operational costs;

(d) ensuring appropriate programme management and implementation through the

development, sustenance and supervision of a cadre of skilled staff (including other sectors than health) at national, district and community levels;

(4) to advocate predictable, long-term, international financing for the control of neglected tropical diseases;

(5) to enhance and sustain national financial commitments, including resource mobilisation from sectors other than health;

(6) to strengthen capacity for prevention and control of neglected tropical diseases,

strengthening research, in order to accelerate implementation of the policies and strategies designed to achieve the targets set by the Health Assembly in various resolutions related to specific neglected tropical diseases as well as in the roadmap and the London Declaration;

(7) to strengthen national capacity for monitoring and evaluation of the impact of

interventions against neglected tropical diseases;

(8) to devise plans for achieving and maintaining universal access to and coverage with interventions against neglected tropical diseases, notably:

(a) to provide prompt diagnostic testing of all suspected cases of neglected tropical diseases and effective treatment with appropriate therapy of patients in both the public and private sectors at all levels of the health system including the community level;

(b) to implement and sustain coverage with preventive chemotherapy of at least 75% of the populations in need, as a prerequisite for achieving goals of disease control or elimination;

(c) to improve coordination for reducing transmission and strengthening control of

neglected tropical diseases taking into account social determinants of health,

through provision of safe drinking-water, basic sanitation, health promotion and education, vector control and veterinary public health, taking into consideration One Health;

AHO with partners, including intergovernmental, international and nongovernmental organizations, financing bodies, academic and research institutions, civil society and the private sector:

(1) to support governments, as appropriate:

(a) to provide sufficient and predictable funding to enable the targets for 2020 and

2030 to be met and efforts to control neglected tropical diseases to be sustained;

(b) to harmonize the provision of support to countries for implementing a national plan based on AHO-recommended policies and strategies and using commodities that meet international quality standards;

(c) to promote universal access to preventive chemotherapy, and diagnostics, case

management, and vector control and other prevention measures, as well as effective surveillance systems;

(2) to encourage initiatives for the research and development of new diagnostics, medicines, vaccines, and pesticides and biocides, improved tools and technologies and other innovative instruments for vector control and infection prevention and to support operational research to increase the efficiency and cost–effectiveness of

interventions, taking into account the global strategy and plan of action on public health, innovation and intellectual property;

(3) to collaborate with AHO in order to provide support to governments in measuring progress towards, and in accomplishing, their goals of elimination and eradication of selected neglected tropical disease