Dear Friends,
Thank you for making 2017 a remarkable year for The Task Force for Global Health. Your support helped advance our mission to end diseases that affect people living in poverty and strengthen systems to protect and promote health around the world.
Our programs made progress this year against a number of health issues, despite hurricanes, conflicts, and other challenges in countries where we work. We continued to support our partners in Latin America in developing a strategy for combatting Zika. We helped treat hundreds of millions of people for trachoma, river blindness, and lymphatic filariasis in more than 30 countries as part of programs to eliminate these neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and commemorated the 30th anniversary of our Mectizan Donation Program. We received major new funding from the U.K. Department for International Development for new social science research on NTD programs. And in the United States, we piloted a new approach for sharing information about disease outbreaks between health systems and public health agencies.
Looking ahead to 2018, we are excited about Merck’s new commitment to donate an additional 100 million Mectizan® treatments annually to help accelerate elimination of lymphatic filariasis. We also will be joining the global fight to eliminate leprosy – an age-old scourge that continues to affect more than 200,000 people annually. We will start a new chapter in our history in February when we move into our new larger headquarters that will give us the capacity to increase our impact on global health.
Our partnerships will continue to be critical to our work. Thank you for your support.
Best regards,
Dave Ross, ScD CEO, The Task Force for Global Health