Despite claims made a half-century ago by leading public health workers and scientists that the eradication of infectious diseases was imminent, the new millennium has arrived with an unabated prevalence of historic diseases as well as the rapid spread of new diseases. Research dollars towards these latter, emerging problems - HIV/AIDS, drug resistant pathogens, and viral hemorrhagic fevers or encephalitis - have been distributed, to a degree, in a manner consistent with their respective health burdens. At the same time, there exists a class of abandoned infectious diseases or infectious diseases that occur among the neglected and marginalized segments of society, where the allocation of research dollars has not been commensurate with their associated morbidity and mortality. The NEW AID Foundation is committed to facilitating research of these perennial and prevalent diseases.

One third of the world's people live in developing countries, where clean water and basic medical services are nonexistent, though famine and war are bountiful. In these places, the leading cause of death is infectious diseases, in some regions accounting for up to 60% of mortality and healthy years lost. Though HIV may be the single greatest threat in many of these areas and resources must not be pulled away from this struggle, other diseases substantially undermine the health of communities and fuel a cycle of poverty and illness [1]. These include more familiar diseases such as tuberculosis, the largest single cause of human death killing over 2 million people each year, and malaria, a disease that is especially hard-hitting for children and accounts for 10% of all healthy years lost in some regions. But other diseases exact large tolls as well: lymphatic filariasis, severely disables 40 million people; Dengue Fever inflicts disease on 20 to 50 million people each year including 500,000 cases of hemorrhagic fever; and African trypanosomaisis (Sleeping Sickness), a lethal disease if untreated, affects between 300,000 and 500,000 individuals, according to WHO estimates. These diseases represent a sample of those problems that have been neglected by western governments and pharmaceutical companies for decades.

Research is necessary for the development of new tools and the improvement of existing approaches. Unfortunately, both the groundbreaking 1990 report of the Commission on Health Research Development, "Health Research: Essential Link to Equity," and the Global Forum for Health Research have documented remarkable discrepancies in the distribution of health research dollars and the burden of disease [2, 3]. This 1990 report determined that only 10% of research dollars was devoted to 90% of the world's health problems, concluding that, for example, "the magnitude of the tuberculosis problem is matched only by its relative neglect by the international community." Attention over the last decade to a limited number of these previously forgotten problems has improved to some extent [4, 5]. But the most recent report by the Global Forum for Health Research has found little improvement in what has come to be called the "10/90 Gap." Only by altering this skewed association can substantial improvements in the health of the world's people be achieved.

Foundation Need

The NEW AID Foundation provides grants to public health scientists to conduct research abroad of neglected infectious diseases. It is our hope that, through these grants, we can advance our understanding of the scientific basis of these diseases and the social factors which lead to their marginalization. The objectives highlighted by our foundation stem from a philosophy which can be found in other non-profit organizations such as the Medicines for Malaria Venture and the Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) - an independent program co-sponsored by UNDP, the World Bank, and WHO. However, only The NEW AID Foundation provides grants to early-career, American scientists so that we can expand our nation's core of researchers devoted to findings interventions for many of the most damaging health problems of the world.