evidence: The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) represent a group of more than a dozen major chronic infectious diseases, most of them parasitic infections, with high endemicity in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The conceptual framework of the NTDs was formulated in the years following the 2000 launch of the Millennium Declaration (Hotez, 2006, 2008a, 2011; Hotez et al., 2006a, 2007; Molyneux et al., 2005). Both the Millennium Declaration and its eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for sustainable poverty reduction were instrumental in shaping global health policy over the next decade, and they provided a platform and basis for large-scale donor support from both public and private sources. Indeed, MDG 6, "to combat AIDS, malaria, and other diseases," helped to galvanize a new awareness for the impact of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and to some extent tuberculosis and stimulated the establishment of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative (Hotez, 2011), in addition to increased research and development support from the National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.