Every year 2 million or more people fall victim to snakebite envenoming, mostly in poor, rural communities of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Between 83,000—138,000 of them die, while hundreds of thousands more suffer debilitating long-term complications or disabilities.

Although some antivenom medicines are highly effective when used promptly and appropriately, many snakebite victims get no treatment at all. Those who do may receive antivenoms which don’t work against the type of snake that bit them, or were not rigorously tested for safety and effectiveness.

To mark World Snakebite Awareness Day on September 19th, the Collection linked below brings together recent MSF work on this highly neglected disease. Several articles and conference presentations help fill evidence gaps on the burden of disease and its impacts or on treatment outcomes with specific antivenoms in specific regions. Others examine how to tackle the formidable challenges of availability and affordability, the absence of regulatory oversight for making, testing and registering antivenoms, and the anemic R&D pipeline for new products—all of which impede access for patients to safe, effective treatment tailored to local snake species.

Dr. Saschveen Singh is a tropical infectious disease advisor for MSF. Read more of MSF's recent work on neglected tropical diseases in pediatric populations, and of Dr. Singh's work at MSF.

On June 30th-July 1, 2022 the research team at Epicentre in Mbarara, Uganda held a two-day workshop about their recent work to address gaps in tuberculosis diagnostics and therapeutics in low-income countries. Sessions included:

• Landscape of TB disease in Uganda: research gaps

• New diagnostic tools and algorithms in adults

• New diagnostic tools and algorithms in children

• Approaches to increasing pediatric TB detection and reducing disease burden

• TB chemotherapeutics

• Perspectives and challenges in TB

To catch up on the presentations, you can view the abstracts through the link below.