Lancaster University is supporting World Neglected Tropical Disease Day which aims to increase awareness of a group of twenty-one different conditions that can cause significant disfigurement and disability.

Today, it is estimated that 1 billion people are affected by the burden of these diseases, mostly in rural, poverty-stricken areas where access to clean water, sanitation and affordable healthcare is limited. NTDs are caused by bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungi and toxins that can spread through dirty water, soil, bites from insects like mosquitoes and sandflies, or close contact with other infected people.

The Centre for Health Informatics, Computing, and Statistics (CHICAS) at Lancaster Medical School has been at the forefront of the statistical community in the fight against NTDs.

Current NTD projects at Lancaster University include:

· National Snakebite Study in Sri Lanka

· Brazilian Leptospirosis Study

· Neglected Tropical Disease Modelling Consortium

· Mapping high risk areas in Africa for the NTD Loa loa filariasis

· The Geostat NTD Hub For sampling design and analysis

The Head of CHICAS Dr Emanuele Giorgi plans to hold a series of workshops focused on the application of geostatistical methods to inform policy decisions on the control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs).

He said: “Part of our scientific duty as statisticians is to advocate for the use of the most robust and efficient statistical methods to inform critical policy decisions. The workshops are an essential component of our endeavours to proactively engage with the global health scientific community and develop statistical methods that integrate scientific knowledge whilst gaining acceptance among policymakers.”

The workshops will bring together three distinct communities: spatial statisticians specialized in applications to global health, epidemiologists with expertise in NTDs and public health professionals and policymakers from low-middle income countries (LMICs). The aim of the workshop series will also include the development of a capacity building network in the global south to support the growth of local statistical expertise that will play a crucial role in informing health policies.

Dr Giorgi held an inaugural workshop in March 2024 where Ministries of Health from various African nations, along with stakeholders from public health organizations and NGOs—including the WHO, USAID, and the Carter Center—convened in Lancaster. This event aimed to outline future directions for the use of model-based geostatistics in shaping policies to eliminate trachoma, a neglected tropical disease (NTD) and a leading cause of blindness in low- and middle-income countries.

The next workshop will be in March 2025 and will be held at Lancaster University. Both workshops are supported by both the Data Science Institute and by the Royal Statistical Society through a Mardia Prize awarded to Dr Giorgi. In addition to Dr Giorgi, PhD candidates Jana Purkiss, Freya Clark and Farah Khalid will play a pivotal role in these activities and showcase their research on soil transmitted helminths and schistomiasis, two neglected tropical diseases that affect vulnerable populations, causing malnutrition, anemia, and organ damage. The workshop will showcase a user-friendly web app for NTD risk mapping, developed by Dr Claudio Fronterre and his team, including Tom Nicholls from Lancaster and engineers from Mantaray Technology.

One of the objectives of these workshops is to develop a plan for the establishment of training hubs in geostatistics that will support local networks of statisticians who can apply geostatistical methods to inform health policy decisions. Participants will aim to agree on a framework to support the development of these training hubs and networks, enabling collaboration with Ministries of Health in their respective countries.

The workshop will also assess the current state of capacity-building in geostatistics across various low- and middle-income countries, identify educational needs, and explore sustainable strategies for training local experts. This type of community participation is crucial for sustainable NTD efforts.