Colleagues from the Global Health and Infection Department at BSMS were part of the organising team behind a week-long exhibition at Westminster to highlight the need for more investment to tackle NTDs.
The inauguration event to launch the exhibition took place on the 30th of January, World NTD Day, and was attended by parliamentarians, healthcare professionals, civil servants, and members of the public.
Catherine West, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green and Chair of the APPG on Malaria and NTDs, hosted the event, which included recorded statements from Dr Socé Fall, the newly appointed Director for NTDs at the World Health Organization, and Professor Getnet Tadele from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and Co-Investigator of the 5S Foundation project.
Professor Tadele highlighted the importance of valuing indigenous knowledge, stating:
“We are mutually interdependent – those from the global north have better technical expertise or competence and resources, while we, living and working in NTD-endemic countries, have a deeper understanding of the context of the country. These must be valued equally.”
Click here to watch Prof. Tadele’s full talk.
The one-week exhibition included six images from partners across the 5S Foundation and the Global Health Research Unit on NTDs at BSMS, as well as two films from the 5S Ethiopia and 5S Rwanda teams on podoconiosis and scabies respectively.
As well as a collection of scabies garments highlighting the presence of this neglected disease in the UK. The knitted items stem from a collaboration between Dr. Vikki Haffenden from the Department of Fashion Textiles at the University of Brighton and the Brighton and Sussex Medical School Public Health team who have been investigating scabies in care homes in the South East of England.
NTDs Research 