u.s. poor afflicted by tropical diseases of africa, asia

From my "US turning in to third-world country" file:

Tropical diseases that ravage Africa, Asia and Latin America commonly occur among the poor in the USA, leaving thousands of people shattered by debilitating complications including mental retardation, heart disease and epilepsy, an analysis showed Monday.

The diseases, caused by chronic viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, disproportionately strike women and children and are largely overlooked by doctors, says author Peter Hotez of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, part of Sabin Vaccine Institute.

Hotez says the diseases go untreated in hundreds of thousands of poor people who live mainly in inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and the Mexican borderlands.

In many cases, he says, the infections cause disabilities that trap sufferers in lasting poverty. His analysis, called "Neglected Infections of Poverty in the United States," appears in the journal he edits, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

As widespread as the diseases are, few people in middle America have heard of them, and many doctors never think to check for them, says Carlos Franco-Paredes of Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, who was not involved in the analysis.

Franco-Paredes says the effect can be devastating: "If you have these infections as a kid, if you're anemic, your ability to learn when you go to school is affected. If you have these infections on a chronic basis, they can affect your ability to become a productive adult and support your family."

Hotez says it is a "disgrace" that diseases causing so much suffering remain at the bottom of the national health agenda.

"If this were occurring among white mothers in the suburbs, you'd hear a tremendous outcry," says Hotez, a microbiologist at George Washington University.

Franco-Paredes says the remedy may be as simple as screening minorities, immigrants and refugees and making sure doctors can diagnose and treat these ailments.

The article lists some of the diseases, their prevalence, and what populations they primarily affect.

Hotez is quoted as saying, "If this were occurring among white mothers in the suburbs, you'd hear a tremendous outcry." That's true, of course. Also true is that increasing numbers of former middle-class suburbanites now find themselves scrounging at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, because their health-care needs wiped out their homes and their savings. So these issues are affecting ever greater numbers of Americans.

Not bad for the Greatest Nation on the Face of the Earth™, eh?

Thanks, as always, to my researcher-in-chief.