Sixty-three countries had eliminated at least one neglected tropical disease by June 2026, up from 42 at the end of 2020. That is one of the clearest signs of progress in the World Health Organization’s new midterm review of the global road map for neglected tropical diseases.
The same assessment also carries a warning: progress is uneven, most disease-specific targets remain off track, and funding is now below pre-pandemic levels. The picture is therefore neither a simple success story nor a reason for pessimism. It is evidence that coordinated public-health programmes can work — and that the gains can be lost when surveillance, treatment and financing weaken.
What has improved
WHO reports that 1.41 billion people required interventions against neglected tropical diseases in 2024. That was 36% fewer than in 2010 and 19% fewer than in 2020. Human African trypanosomiasis, commonly known as sleeping sickness, has fallen by 98% since 1999. Guinea worm disease reached a record low of 10 reported human cases in 2025.
Countries are also integrating programmes more closely. Forty-three countries have adopted strategies covering multiple skin-related neglected tropical diseases, already exceeding the 2030 target. Shared surveillance, diagnosis and treatment pathways can make limited health-system resources work more efficiently.
Why “elimination” needs careful interpretation
Eliminating a disease as a public-health problem does not always mean that the pathogen has disappeared everywhere. The exact definition depends on the disease and may refer to bringing transmission or disease burden below a specified threshold. Continued surveillance is essential because imported infections, conflict, displacement and environmental change can allow transmission to return.
This distinction matters for public communication. A country-level milestone is a verified achievement, but it is not permission to stop monitoring, diagnosis or community services.
The remaining gaps
WHO says only three disease-specific indicators reached their 2025 milestones. Dengue cases rose to a record 15.1 million in 2024, while deaths from vector-borne neglected diseases increased. Yaws eradication is not on track, and gaps in timely, disaggregated data make it difficult to identify who is being missed.
Financing is another structural risk. Available resources remain about 30% below pre-COVID-19 levels, and a small number of donors supplied nearly 80% of international development assistance for these diseases between 2018 and 2024. Such concentration makes programmes vulnerable to sudden cuts that can interrupt mass treatment, case management, vector control and the safe use of donated medicines.
What the next phase requires
The 2026 review argues for making integration the default: embedding services in primary health care, strengthening national laboratories and surveillance, protecting access to medicines and combining interventions where diseases overlap. It also calls for more domestic financing and for equity to guide programme design, because the heaviest burden often falls on communities with the least access to routine health services.
Scientific progress is expanding the available toolkit. WHO points to child-friendly treatment for schistosomiasis, generic medicines for leishmaniasis, a dengue vaccine and regulatory progress on vaccines or medicines for chikungunya, onchocerciasis and sleeping sickness. New tools, however, only improve health when they reach the people who need them and are supported by reliable diagnosis and follow-up.
The central lesson
The decline in disease burden shows that long-term public-health work can deliver measurable results. The funding and surveillance gaps show why those results cannot be treated as permanent. The next five years will depend less on isolated campaigns and more on durable health-system capacity.
