‘Some of these diseases are in the Bible’: despair as cuts halt progress on age-old tropical illnesses

They are debilitating afflictions that people don’t know about, don’t understand and struggle to pronounce. Now health workers fear they will surge in Africa as USAID-funded drug distribution programmes are cutSince 2013, for around two weeks each year, Sulaiman Tarawallie has pulled on his community drug distributor (CDD) uniform and gone from household to household in his remote farming community to hand out medication to fight river blindness and lymphatic filariasis. Once he has completed the rounds of his village, he heads further out to take the drugs to even more remote homes – keeping the diseases that had plagued generations at bay with a handful of pills.But this year, Tarawallie, who works as a community health worker and primary school teacher in Sierra Leone’s northern Bombali district, will not be making his annual trip. Continue reading...