Travel, migration and neglected tropical diseases

Abstract

There are slightly different defi nitions of “neglected” tropical diseases. However, the main concept is that they are diseases related to poverty, absent from the global public health agenda. The exponential growth of travel and migration worldwide, which has occurred in the past few decades, has caused an increased circulation of tropical diseases outside the countries of origin. Actually, neglected tropical diseases of migrants and travellers could be considered as a mirror of the huge public health problems they cause in the affected countries, which roughly, though not perfectly, correspond to the tropical world. In Western countries, health care providers are often unfamiliar with these infections, potentially causing a delay in the diagnosis, and therefore exposing many patients to short-term or, more often, long-term, severe consequences. In this chapter we describe some neglected tropical diseases of particular interest in relation to travel and migration, because of either their frequency, or their severity, or both.