Sustainable Approaches to Infectious Disease Control and Elimination

Rationale

Towards the endgame and beyond: sustainable control and elimination of infectious diseases

While the Covid-19 pandemic and other recent epidemics have drawn global attention to preventing and controlling disease outbreaks, the battle against long-term endemic infectious diseases continues unabated. Malaria, tuberculosis (TB), HIV/AIDS, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are still among the top 10 major infectious diseases globally. Malaria, TB, and HIV/AIDS are the “big three” killer diseases; together they account for approximately 2.7 million deaths per year. One-sixth of the world’s population suffer from one or more NTDs, with a collective DALY burden equivalent to each of the “big three”. They all impose significant social and economic burdens, disproportionally affecting vulnerable and poor communities.

Despite decades of control efforts and substantial progress in combatting these major infectious diseases, elimination has so far been elusive. Even when initially successful, many interventions have not proven sustainable over longer periods of time. In some cases progress has stalled, in others diseases re-emerged with dire consequences. Nevertheless, bringing infectious diseases to an end is the ambitious target set for 2030 within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG Target 3.3: End the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases), and the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched several roadmaps for their elimination.

In this 3-week course, we will highlight and examine important challenges to the control and elimination of these major infectious diseases, which can range from biological, operational, technical to economic, sociocultural or political in nature. We will discuss sustainable approaches to infectious disease control and elimination, focussing not only on technical and programmatic factors that can influence sustainability, but also on contextual and environmental impacts. Alternative paradigms to current global strategies will also be discussed, with emphasis on systemic approaches to build and maintain more resilient and sustainable health systems and communities to tackle infectious disease threats.

The course is for health professionals and researchers involved in infectious disease prevention, control and elimination from a programme, health system or any other perspective.

The aim of the course is to strengthen the participants’ capacity to improve the impact of infectious disease control and elimination efforts through the development and implementation of sustainable strategies, based on scientific evidence and adapted to a specific context.

The focus is on major infectious diseases (malaria, TB, HIV, and a selection of NTDs -leishmaniasis, leprosy, helminthiases) in resource-constrained settings, with particular attention to vulnerable groups.

ITM has a longstanding track record in research, education and services on prevention and integrated control of malaria, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and NTDs. This will be complemented by the involvement of ITM’s worldwide network of partners and alumni as guest lecturers. The course also builds on the rich exchange of experience between students from many different regions in the world.