Funding to fight diseases including parasites that cause disfiguring elephantiasis, hookworms and a blinding eye infection called trachoma, would more than double under the 2011 budget proposal, to $155 million from $65 million.

Most of the new funding comes under the State Department and this is no accident, said Dr. Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and a professor at George Washington University.

These neglected tropical diseases disproportionately affect countries of global security interest to the United States -- countries from the Islamic conference, nuclear weapons countries, Hotez said in a telephone interview.

This also has important implications for foreign policy and the State Department.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population, suffer from one or more neglected tropical diseases.

You have got the most common infections of poor people, Hotez said. We can do something about it for a fraction of the cost of doing anything else. You can have an extraordinary impact for a low cost.

Schistosomiasis or snail fever, which can cause deadly blood loss, affects hundreds of thousands of people in Yemen, for example.

Hotez and other researchers have published a number of studies showing that these infections affect not only the health of entire populations, but economies.

These diseases actually trap people in poverty, Hotez said. Mass drug treatment could help pull entire groups out of poverty, he says.

Controlling just one disease -- chronic hookworm -- would improve future wage earnings by an extraordinary 43 percent, Hotez wrote in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases in August.

In Kenya, deworming could raise per capita earning by 30 percent. And in India, controlling lymphatic filariasis would add $1.5 billion to the country's GNP. Lymphatic filariasis is a parasitical infection that causes elephantiasis, a gross enlargement of legs, genitals and other extremities.

However advocates for other diseases, notably AIDS, complained that the new budget cuts global funding for some of the biggest programs.

It cuts the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria by $50 million, the non-profit Global Health Initiative Working Group said in a statement.

The group, which includes the American Public Health Association and the AIDS group AmFAR, called a $151 million increase for maternal and child health less than half of what would be needed from the U.S. to address the full problem.

With the pandemic of H1N1 swine flu barely on the wane, the budget cuts funding for pandemic influenza and other new infections by 29 percent to $75 million from $106 million.

Medicine