Overview

In January 2012, the Director-General of WHO launched a roadmap for accelerating work to overcome the global impact of neglected tropical diseases. The roadmap targets the eradication of yaws by 2020. This is the second attempt to achieve the eradication goal since the uncompleted mass campaign led by WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund in the 1950s and 1960s.

Also in January 2012, the results of a randomized controlled clinical trial in Papua New Guinea were published, showing that a single-dose of oral azithromycin was as effective in treating yaws as the standard injection of benzathine penicillin. This finding, considered the most significant on yaws in the past 60 years, will help to overcome the operational and logistic challenges of using injectable penicillin to achieve eradication. Oral azithromycin given as a single dose would greatly facilitate large-scale treatment in the field.