Overview
The scale of our work is significant. In partnership with hundreds of organizations in the United States and around the world, our programs and projects touch the lives of hundreds of millions of people in more than 150 countries. We measure our reach by the number of people who receive medicines each year through our programs to control and eliminate blinding trachoma, river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, and intestinal worms.We are on track to help eliminate blinding trachoma, river blindness, and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) by 2025. These neglected tropical diseases have plagued humanity for millennia and continue to burden hundreds of millions of people in developing countries.
Since our founding, we have also positively affected a broad range of global health problems. Our contributions include:
- Raising childhood immunization rates in developing countries from 20 to 80 percent from 1984 to 1990;
- Partnering with the pharmaceutical industry that donates billions of dollars annually in essential medicines for the control and elimination of neglected tropical diseases;
- Focusing international attention on the importance of collaboration and compassion in global health;
- Increasing access to treatment for multi-drug resistant tuberculosis for the world’s poor;
- Supporting the design and implementation of strong immunization records systems within U.S. public health departments;
- Managing the largest disease mapping project ever undertaken, the Global Trachoma Mapping Project, using a smartphone-based application that we developed called LINKS;
- Supporting the simultaneous global “switch” of the type of oral polio vaccine used in routine immunizations, which is a vital step in eradicating polio;
- Developing a comprehensive integrated strategy for cholera prevention and control that is being used to fight the disease globally;
- Strengthening U.S. preparedness to respond to disease outbreaks by guiding the automation of public health laboratories.
