Politico: Cuts to Helen Keller's Disease Prevention Work Threaten Decades of Progress

A recent piece in Politico highlights Helen Keller’s efforts to treat and prevent neglected tropical diseases ‒ work now imperiled by US government funding cuts.  

Until January 2025, Helen Keller implemented a USAID-funded program to combat neglected tropical diseases in six West African countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Sierra Leone.

Working in close collaboration with national Ministries of Health, the program mobilized donated drugs and hundreds of thousands of community health workers to deliver preventative medicine through large-scale drug distribution campaigns.

In the article, Helen Keller’s Vice President of Neglected Tropical Diseases, Dr. Angela Weaver, emphasized the remarkable legacy of the USAID initiative.

“We were on the brink of elimination for some of these diseases,” says Angela.  “It was truly a partnership. What the US brought was much-needed implementation money to get drugs from point A to point B, into the mouths of people that need them, in an efficient and safe way.”

Now, that hard-earned progress is at risk due to the US government’s decision to terminate this high-impact, decades-old program.

“We have an opportunity to eliminate some of these diseases that have been around for generations and generations,” Angela says. “Taxpayer dollars … have already been invested in this program, and we’re throwing that away if we just let these programs go completely.”

Read the full the article in Politico.

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