Congressman Chris Smith’s (R-NJ) bill, The End Neglected Tropical Diseases Act (H.R. 1415), was adopted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday morning, moving it one step closer to the House Floor for a vote.

    “H.R. 1415 deals with a group of seventeen parasitic, bacterial, and viral diseases which blind, disable, disfigure, and sometimes kill victims from among the more than one billion of the world’s poorest people,” Smith, chairman of the House global health subcommittee, stated on Tuesday.

    “These diseases trap the most marginalized communities in a cycle of poverty,” Smith said. “H.R. 1415 will support the control and elimination of NTDs [natural tropical diseases] in the U.S. and abroad.”

    The End Neglected Tropical Diseases Act would improve the U.S. response to NTDs like Ebola, rabies, leprosy, and other blinding and disabling diseases afflicting  over one billion of the poorest people in the world in the tropical regions like in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

    Outbreaks of some of these diseases have also been reported in the U.S. and other developing countries as of late. And they have, in the past, shown an ability to spread and threaten to become pandemics like with the Ebola and Zika viruses, and now with a plague outbreak in Madagascar.

    Smith’s bill would try improve efforts by USAID to respond to these diseases, and would seek to bring together efforts by various federal agencies and aid programs to develop and distribute medicines to treat NTDs.

    “This legislation emphasizes field research by USAID on the impact of treatments that helps future application of often lifesaving medicines,” Smith said.

    The bill would also call on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to support centers of excellence for NTD research, training, and treatment.

    Experts have testified that these diseases are “the most important diseases you never heard of,” affecting almost all of the world’s poorest  which, if left untreated, can keep them in poverty.

    “These diseases not only can keep children from attending school and their parents from working, they also cause excessive bleeding by mothers during birth and result in low birth weight babies,” Smith said.

    “The most common NTDs can be controlled and eliminated with the application of low-cost donated medicines. However, there is still much work to be done to prepare for currently unknown diseases that may appear on the international scene and to reach the World Health Organization’s control and elimination goals by 2020.  To achieve these goals, heightened support is needed now from both new and longstanding partners.”