have an enormous impact in terms of disease burden and quality of life. NTDs cause the loss of up to 534,000 lives and 57 million disability-adjusted life years each year. NTDs surpass both malaria and tuberculosis in causing greater loss of life-years to disability and premature death. Many NTDs cause disfigurement and disability, leading to stigma, social discrimination, and societal mar­gin­al­i­za­tion. (4) NTDs create an economic burden of billions of dollars through the loss of productivity and high costs of health care required for treatment. People afflicted by NTDs are less productive than their healthy counterparts. NTDs jeopardize the ability of people to attend work and school, or to produce at full capacity. For example, controlling one NTD, hookworm, in children can result in a 43-percent increase in future wage earnings. (5) The social, economic, and health burden of NTDs falls primarily on low- and middle-income countries, where access to safe water, sanitation, and health care is limited. At least 100 countries face two endemic NTD burdens, and 30 countries carry six or more endemic NTDs. (6) NTDs are not confined to the developing world, however. Several NTD outbreaks have been reported in the United States and other developed countries, especially among the poor. In the United States, NTDs disproportionately affect people living in poverty, and especially minorities, including up to 2.8 million African-Americans with toxocariasis and 300,000 or more people, mostly Hispanic-Americans, with Chagas disease. (7) In 2014, an outbreak of Ebola Virus Diseases (Ebola) caused a pandemic that infected more than 20,000 people, including more than 8,000 deaths. Although not listed as an NTD by the World Health Organization, Ebola shares the same characteristics as other NTDs by affecting people living under conditions of poverty and is concentrated almost exclusively in impoverished populations in the developing world . Even when the disease had spread to the United States and other developed countries,