Talk:Neglected tropical disease research and development

This article was the subject of an educational assignment in Spring 2014. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Rice University/ Human Development in Global and Local Communities, Section 2 (Spring 2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki.

Heather's comment

Hi Jed,

It's Heather from class. Not only do I think you chose a really interesting topic to research, I also think you did a nice job of setting up the article in Wikipedia. For someone like me (with no medical background), I'm glad you set up links to each of the medical terms so I can easily read up on the individual diseases if I need clarification. My only suggestion might be to set up a space titled "arguments for/argumetns against neglected tropical disease R&D" (or something along those lines). You do mention reasons why drug companies haven't pursued further development in the Intro and Deficient Market sections, so I think you already have the information in the article. My suggestion would be to just rearrange the flow so it's a little more straight forward what the pros and cons of NTD R&D are, and then that can flow into the section where you list the different policy initiatives. Hmring (talk) 20:19, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dee's Comment

I'm very impressed with all of your research and work! The article is well laid out - explaining why this is important, the number of deaths resulting, and the demographics of people affected. I'd suggest breaking up the intro paragraph, perhaps adding "disincentives" and "stakeholders" sub-headers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deefalvo (talk • contribs) 20:32, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Stephanie's Comment

Jed - I think this topic is really great and there is a good logical organization to the article. I thought the intro section was a little long with a lot of details that maybe could be just left for the complete article (or as Dee mentioned, finding a way to break it up a little). Also, in another class we had read about the Institute for OneWorld Health which is an NGO that works on pharmaceutical development for neglected diseases - I wonder if adding a nonprofit model as one of the alternatives would be beneficial to show the different way the problem is being addressed. Also, perhaps looking at how the global community is addressing it - I know one of the Millennium Development Goals relates to providing developing countries with access to affordable drugs - what are the UN, the WHO doing in this area? This may be out of the scope of your article though. Also, I know that patent law is a major hurdle - but that patent law is not as strict in countries like India - is that having any influence on making progress in drug development? Just some thoughts to consider! --Saehawkins (talk) 19:10, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Andrej's Comment

Jed, I'm very interested in following your project. With a bit of a science background and an interest in international public health, this is a great topic to explore.

Some thoughts/recommendations I had reading through your article:

The discussion mentions two main avenues by which NTDs are combatted: (1) via environmental and social determinants of health and (2) mass drug adminstration. Also mentioned is the high cost of drug development.

I'm wondering if there exists any benefit/cost analysis of addressing any specific NTD which would compare the current benefit/cost of addressing the issue on the enviornmental and social sides (i.e. how much is vector control, eductaion, sanitation, etc. costing and what has been the benefit as compared to the prevalence (and costs) of the disease BEFORE any intervention). THEN, if it's plausable, to flush out the current costs of drug development versus the benefits of having an available drug (i.e. change in the efficacy of combatting the disease) to determine at what point it would behoove society to have a drug developed, thus putting the pressure on bio/pharma.

I brought this up in class, but wanted to echo it now - I can see a response from Bio/Pharma being that it's ultimately cheaper to maintain - or even increase - efforts in the environmental/social side of the battle than it would be for them (Bio/Pharma) to invest in investing further resources in researching drug treatments for NTDs.

I don't know if that type of information is available, but it would be a powerful piece of information to have to demonstrate that it makes ABSOLUTE sense to invest in drug development to combat NTDs.

I really like the Policy Initiative section - very through. Nice overview of what has - and is - going on in this realm.

In the "R&D Capacity Building in Middle Income Countries" sub-section, I'm not following the math - 62 NTD products in development, then adding HIV/malaria/TB - 123 products (= 25% of total products). What products? All drug development products currently being researched? Maybe make this part clearer.

I'm curious and looking forward to the development of the "Harmonization of Governance Structures" section.

Again, nice work!

--bruindre (talk) 21:00, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Anand's Comment

This article looks great. My one suggestion is maybe to have a table that lists neglected tropical diseases by DALYs or deaths. Something like this:

Neglected Tropical Diseases Worldwide Burden
Disease	DALYs/year	deaths/year
ascariasis	100,000	3,000
trichuriasis	900,000	2,000

I just made up those numbers, in case you were wondering. Anyways, the article looks very good.
--AnandJRao (talk) 06:32, 4 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bridget's comments

Interesting article on NTD! I particularly enjoyed learning about the open source collaboration initiatives. The article mentions the Tropical Disease Initiative to create the source drug bank. I was wondering what companies are participating? Maybe a list of companies could be created with details about what they have contributed in terms of open source information. I also agree with the above comments that the intro could be shortened and some of the text moved into the body of the article. Overall a very informative article! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.118.199.125 (talk) 14:07, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Areas to work on

This article still needs some work. The lede (the part above the first heading) should be a summary of the article, and normally does not need any citations (everything in the lede should be present in more detail, with citations, lower in the article. I have added the template placing this article under Wikiproject Medicine. I suggest that messages be posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine and Wikipedia:Requests for feedback asking for feedback on this article. -- Donald Albury 11:28, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Categorization

I'm not a mentor, so their suggestions have priority over mine; you can even ignore mine. :-)

Categories serve to tie like topics together. A few categories need to be added to the article. It may be worth seeing how Tropical Disease Research is categorized. Also consider the categories: Tropical diseases, Public health, Medical research or perhaps some categories of these.

A very informative article. Thanks, SBaker43 (talk) 18:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We mentors do not have any special status or priority. Comments should be judged on their usefulness, not on who they come from, with the exception that students should give special heed to comments from their professors. :) -- Donald Albury 12:02, 18 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment

I've increased this to C-class, even though lots of cleanup is needed. For example, the list of sources should be single-spaced and bulleted. -- Ssilvers (talk) 19:01, 27 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Plans to edit article

I am an undergraduate student at Rice University in Houston, TX and am planning on editing this article as part of a Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities class. I am considering combining this page with the “Neglected tropical disease” article. Does this seem like a good idea? I think there is a lot of information about neglected tropical diseases, but I don’t think that splitting the topic in two makes sense since both articles are missing a lot of important information. If combing the articles is not the best option, I would like to add more recent data and research initiatives to this article. I plan on using scholarly articles as my sources.

I would welcome any feedback on this project that anyone has.Juliannadrew (talk) 22:09, 20 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Any thoughts on this idea? Akweaver32 (talk) 16:29, 3 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2011 Spring term.

The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 16:36, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]