Tropical medicine
They must simultaneously study the specialty of infectious diseases while completing a full-time course load to receive their Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Additionally, they must spend two years at one of the UK centers approved for tropical medicine (located in London, Liverpool, or Birmingham).
Physicians in the UK who wish to be certified in tropical medicine must spend at least a year abroad in an area lacking resources.
The training of United States tropical doctors is similar, though it is not a board recognized specialty in America.
[9] Without the expensive and high-tech medical equipment of developed, western countries, physicians in the tropics are left with few options.
Many under-developed countries do not have a care strategy, and of those that do, they aren't as effective as they need to be to stop the spread of HIV.
Certain types of Plasmodium can leave dormant parasites in the liver that can reawaken months or years later, causing additional relapses of the disease.
[13] According to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, an estimated 9 million people were infected with TB in the year 2013 alone.
Tuberculosis is extremely expensive to treat, and treatments are now becoming ineffective due to drug-resistant TB strains.
In 2005, the World Health Organization performed a study that showed 80% of chronic disease deaths occurred in low to middle income countries.
Lack of education and preventive medicine in under-developed countries, along with malnutrition or poor diet lead to many risk factors for non-communicable diseases.
Tropical medicine requires research and assistance from the fields of epidemiology, microbiology, virology, parasitology, and logistics.
Physicians of tropical medicine must have effective communication skills, as many of the patients they interact with do not speak English comfortably.
For example, in an attempt to manage the Chagas disease being brought into the almost Chagas-free Brazilian city São Paulo by Bolivian immigrants, an interdisciplinary team was set up.
They examined reasons for lack of adherence to treatment, and used this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of their interventions.
For example, from 2009 to 2011, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine did an interventional study on a cohort of female sex workers (FSW) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a country in Western Africa.
321 HIV-unaffected FSWs were provided with peer-led HIV/STI education, HIV/STI testing and care, psychological support, general healthcare, and services for reproductive health.
In the actual cohort with access to interventions not a single HIV infection was observed in the collective 409 person-years of follow-up.
In World War II alone, it was estimated almost one million soldiers had been infected by a tropical disease while serving.
Malaria was especially widespread in the Pacific, though soldiers in Southern Europe and Northern Africa also contracted tropical diseases.
Lymphatic filariasis was such a problem it caused a $100 million evacuation of U.S. troops out of New Guinea and the Tonga Islands.
[2] In both the Korean and Vietnam Wars the United States army continued to be affected by tropical diseases.
In 1967, Captain Robert Phillips earned the Lasker Award for developing a type of IV therapy that reduced cholera's fatality rate from 60% to less than 1%.
[2] Looking forward, the United States military currently has clinical trials testing for vaccines of malaria, adenovirus infection, dengue, and HIV/AIDS underway.
