Warning: looking up photos of the disease can be horrifying
Here's the relevant bit of the article:
When Dr. Isaac Chikwanha was a kid in Zimbabwe, he got schistosomiasis.
At the time, he didn't think about the cause of this parasitic disease: a worm that penetrates your skin and takes up residence in your blood vessels. And he didn't worry about short-term health consequences โ such as blood in your urine โ and he didn't know about the long-term consequences when the disease goes untreated, including organ damage and reduced learning ability.
Instead, as a 7-year-old, he thought of it as a point of pride.
But there's one thing he's certain of now that he's a doctor: There's a major gap in conquering the disease, because the medication is designed only for school-age children and adults. Nobody knows exactly how many preschoolers have schistosomiasis but experts estimate that 50 million preschoolers are at risk but lack a good treatment option.
Of course, there's a hack: Crushing the current pill into a smaller dose. However, Chikwanha says, even breaking a pill in half or third or quarters doesn't guarantee an appropriate dose for a preschooler.
"It gets complicated," he says. And crushing raises another problem โ when the pill is mixed with water rather than swallowed, it has a strong bitter taste, although adding syrup can help. So the reality is that many little kids are left untreated.
Chikwanha, a senior director at the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund in Japan, says these youngsters represent a "neglected population" with a neglected tropical disease.
Now that's about to change.
After more than a decade of work, a version of praziquantel designed specifically for preschoolers is on the cusp of becoming a reality. The Pediatric Praziquantel Consortium, a team of public and private partners, has developed a pill that dissolves in the mouth without a bitter taste and is the right dosage for the preschool population. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization gave its stamp of approval to this new pill, adding the medication to its list of prequalified medicines which have been assessed for quality, safety and efficacy.