Inferring Patterns, Dynamics, and Model-Based Metrics of Epidemiological Risks of Neglected Tropical Diseases

Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) pose a devastating obstacle to health and remain a serious concern to poverty and socio-economic upliftment. Recently, WHO with the local public health department has scaled up efforts in control and even eliminating some of the neglected diseases. In spite of this there seems to be long road ahead to achieve complete elimination of NTDs. Because of scarcity in resources and lack of data, implications from field studies have been limited. Mathematical modeling techniques have been proven to be extremely helpful for other directly transmitted nonneglected infectious diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis. This chapter collects some of the recent mathematical techniques and its implementation procedures used for other diseases to study dynamics of NTDs in the face of scarce data in a resource limited settings.