The Guardian: Cuts to Helen Keller’s Disease Prevention Work Put Millions of Lives at Risk
Global health correspondent Kat Lay details the devastating disruptions caused by cuts to US government funding in a piece in The Guardian. For the story, Lay interviewed Helen Keller Intl’s Vice President of Neglected Tropical Diseases, Dr. Angela Weaver, as well as Sulaiman Tarawallie, a community health hero in Sierra Leone.
For more than a decade, Sulaiman has provided his community with preventative medicine for blinding and disabling diseases like lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis – also known as river blindness – during annual mass drug administration campaigns. But this year, Sulaiman will be unable to care for his community due to the US government’s decision to suspend programs to treat and prevent neglected tropical diseases.
Until January 2025, Helen Keller was the lead implementing partner for a USAID-funded program to control and eliminate five long-intractable diseases in six countries in West Africa. The program leveraged donated medicines and hundreds of thousands of community health heroes like Sulaiman to lead country-wide drug distribution events.
These efforts were paying off. In 2023, the country of Mali celebrated the elimination of blinding trachoma. And in January of this year, Niger became the first country in Africa to eliminate onchocerciasis. But now, that work has been suspended.
“For such a small amount, we’ve been able to reach so many people, and we could finally get rid of some of these diseases that have been around forever,” Angela told The Guardian. “To have that all put at risk is really devastating. Just in our program alone, there are over 100 million people who are now going to be at risk.”
Our collective progress is now in danger. Community health hero Sulaiman pleaded for the US government to reverse its decision.
“Thanks to this program, you can’t find anyone who has these diseases in my community,” he told The Guardian. “But my worry now, if this program is stopped, is that the worst might happen.”
Read the full article in The Guardian.
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