Surveillance and response: Tools and approaches for the elimination stage of neglected tropical diseases

The presentation of the World Health Organization (WHO)’s roadmap for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in January 2012 raised optimism that many NTDs can indeed be eliminated. To make this happen, the endemic, often low-income countries with still heavy NTD burdens must substantially strengthen their health systems. In particular, they need not only to apply validated, highly sensitive diagnostic tools and sustainable effective control approaches for treatment and transmission control, but also to participate in the development and use of surveillance–response schemes to ensure that progress made also is consolidated and sustained. Surveillance followed-up by public health actions consisting of response packages tailored to interruption of transmission in different settings will help to effectively achieve the disease control/elimination goals by 2020, as anticipated by the WHO roadmap. Risk-mapping geared at detection of transmission hotspots by means of geospatial and other dynamic approaches facilitates decision-making at the technical as well as the political level. Surveillance should thus be conceived and developed as an intervention approach and at the same time function as an early warning system for the potential re-emergence of endemic infections as well as for new, rapidly spread epidemics and pandemics.