The COUNTDOWN Consortium, hosted at LSTM, is holding two sessions at the COR-NTD (Coalition for Operational Research on Neglected Tropical Diseases) annual meeting today in Atlanta, Georgia, USA ahead of next week’s American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) Meeting.
COR-NTD aims to strengthen the community of researchers, program implementers and their supporters to address knowledge gaps in a coordinated way. This helps inform the agenda of future research and facilitates the global efforts of the World Health Organization and endemic countries to overcome NTDs.
The Secretariat of COR-NTD is the Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center (NTD-SC), a program of the Task Force for Global Health that manages grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Today’s sessions are Wash on Worms: Integrating and Strengthening Multi-Disciplinary Actions on Schistosomiasis and Soil-Transmitted Helminthiasis and Examining the Demands Placed on Community Drug Distributors and members of the COUNTDOWN team will be presenting to colleagues throughout.
Set up in December 2014 following an initial £7 million grant allocation from DFID, COUNTDOWN remit is to trial and evaluate new approaches to drug distribution, which target those people who are currently overlooked and excluded, examining how NTD programmes can be better integrated into broader health system responses.