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About the Authors:
Vivek Karun
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: School of Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America
Peter J. Hotez
Affiliations Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, Departments of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology, National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America, James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States of America, Department of Biology, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, United States of America, Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8770-1042
Todd K. Rosengart
Affiliation: Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of AmericaCitation: Karun V, Hotez PJ, Rosengart TK (2017) Global surgery and the neglected tropical diseases. PLoS Negl Trop Dis11(9): e0005563. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0005563
Editor: Sara Lustigman, New York Blood Center, UNITED STATES
Published: September 28, 2017
Copyright: © 2017 Karun et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
At the sunset of the Millennium Development Goals there was a global awakening that hundreds of millions of people living in resource-poor countries lacked safe and equitable access to even basic surgeries. In response, a Lancet Commission on Global Surgery was launched in April 2015 under the premise that surgery is an integral component of a properly functioning healthcare system [1]. The commission aims to integrate surgery into the global agenda and identify strategies to provide quality care worldwide in an effort to enhance “universal access to safe, affordable surgical and anesthesia care” [1,2]. The launch coincided with the publishing of their landmark report, which highlighted that an astonishing 5 billion people lack accessible surgical care and that investing in scaling up surgical services until 2030 is necessary and cost effective [2].
Although it is not specifically addressed in the commission’s report, 2 of the largest global surgery programs are already underway in conjunction with mass drug...