The Global Health Innovative Technology (GHIT) Fund has launched NTDpedia: Your Guide to Neglected Tropical Diseases.
Designed as an accessible, visually intuitive digital encyclopaedia, NTDpedia aims to address a root cause of neglect: Most people have never heard of these diseases. Awareness is the first step; people cannot advocate for, fund, or research a disease they do not know exists.
While Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3) sets a clear mandate to end epidemics of NTDs by 2030 under the banner “Leaving No One Behind,” NTDs remain severely underfunded and overlooked. Affected populations are trapped in a vicious cycle: Poverty breeds disease and disease deepens poverty. Lack of clean water and sanitation elevates infection risks, while inadequate healthcare infrastructure leads to severe complications, economic loss, social stigma, and further marginalisation.
“The greatest barrier to ending NTDs is not just the lack of medical tools but also lack of awareness and societal apathy,” said Osamu Kunii, CEO of the GHIT Fund.
“NTDpedia was built to transform a distant problem into something people can understand and then care about, which is the first step toward meaningful global action.”
Supervised by world-renowned tropical medicine and global health expert Kenji Hirayama from Nagasaki University, NTDpedia covers the 21 disease groups recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO), including viral, bacterial, parasitic, and fungal infections, as well as snakebite envenoming and noma.
To help users intuitively navigate and relate to these complex conditions, the platform introduces two distinct visual discovery frameworks:
1. Four curated key phrases to personalise the cause:
Climate change: Highlighting diseases that expand into new geographies, including high-income nations, as a warming climate combines with global travel and trade
Poor sanitation and poverty: Showing how unsafe water, poor sanitation, and crowded housing keep these diseases circulating and how illness in turn deepens poverty.
Children at high risk: Highlighting diseases that fall hardest on children, affecting growth, schooling, and lifelong health.
Once common in Japan: Revealing that several of these diseases were once present in Japan and no longer remain in living memory.
2. Categorised visual transmission: Diseases are categorised by how they spread and what causes them: parasites, bacteria, viruses, insects, other animals, water/soil, and other routes.
The GHIT Fund envisions NTDpedia becoming a resource for anyone curious about these diseases, from students and teachers to companies and advocates. Apathy often reflects unfamiliarity rather than indifference. By making these diseases visible and understandable, the GHIT Fund aims to build public support that drives investment in research and development of drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics for NTDs.