UNDERSTANDING OUR IMMUNE SYSTEMS PROTECTS ALL OF US
Dan Colley, PhD, University of Georgia, Athens, Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Disease
"What happens in Kenya affects us here in Georgia, not only in direct health benefits, but also in direct economic and security terms. We live in a global village and if we don't tackle health now, we will have to tackle much more than that later."
Dan Colley, PhD, has spent four decades looking for better ways to diagnose and eliminate horrible infections that most Americans have never heard of. One is schistosomiasis, one of the most neglected and debilitating tropical diseases in the world. More than 200 million people, or two-thirds the entire population of the U.S., half of whom are children, suffer from this parasitic worm infection. Because it can devastate communities and wreak havoc on economic development, support and funding for Colley's and his colleagues' research in global health is vital to improving health and ensuring economic stability around the world.
This infection is prevalent in parts of Africa, South America and Asia but is relatively unknown here. It is spread when skin is exposed to parasites living in water. The worms enter the skin as people wash clothes, swim or fish. Although the worms can survive in the blood stream for many years, they eventually can damage internal organs, including the liver, and lead to deficiencies in brain and physical development of children that limit their ability to hold jobs and provide for themselves or their families. A legacy of this parasite is a severe drag on long-term economic productivity for the country as a whole.
Colley is working on ways to better administer needed pills, develop and evaluate diagnostic tools, and use data to influence and assist countries where the disease is prevalent. He studies the ways schistosomiasis makes people sick and why some people get severely ill and others do not when exposed to disease. He wants to know if there is a possibility for a vaccine against schistosomiasis, because some people do develop some resistance to re-infection. He says these kinds of investments in research are needed not only for studying a person's immune response to schistosomiasis, but for understanding our immune systems and how to better deliver treatment to fight disease in general.
Colley acknowledges that it's difficult for most Americans to appreciate why they should care about unusual tropical diseases with strange names that are a world away from their neighborhoods. He is quick to add that Americans have a direct self-interest in supporting global health research on diseases like schistosomiasis. "What happens in Kenya affects us here in Georgia, not only in direct health benefits, but also in direct economic and security terms. If workers are less efficient and economies suffer because people are too sick to work, prices in Georgia will go up. We live in a global village and if we don't tackle health now, we will have to tackle much more than that later."