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Abstract
According to WHO estimates, the global burden of the NTDs for all ages, 21 million DALYs, is just over half as large as the global burden of malaria.1 Just over a third of this burden falls in those aged 10-24 years, and, in Africa, the NTDs cause 6% of the total burden for young people, compared with 3% for malaria and 9% for HIV/AIDS. Getting disability weights right is only one of the many challenges for assessing the burden of the NTDs.4 Other key issues include the continued lack of good information on incidence and prevalence for many populations, the difficulty of assessing incidence and prevalence of highly focal diseases, quantification of so-called subtle morbidity-ie, small decrements in functioning (eg, fatigue) associated with chronic infection-estimation of chronic disease deaths attributable to the long-term effects of NTDs, and estimation of cause-specific mortality in regions without usable death registration data.