I am writing this letter reading the article entitled "Devastating Global Impact of Neglected Tropical Diseases" by Dr. Peter Hotez that appeared in the August 2009 issue of Microbe (p. 366). This topic was very interesting to me for two reasons; one is that I am a professional microbiologist that taught at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, and the other is that I was born in Taiwan, a place that used to have many tropical infectious diseases. In reading Dr. Hotez's article I started comparing Taiwan, which is now a well-developed industrial nation, with those countries in Africa that are still mired in poverty and have many of these neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). I started thinking about what happened in Taiwan and what happened in those African countries. Taiwan was a colony of Japan before Word War II for about 40 years, and those African countries were colonies of European colonial empires for 200 years. What were the differences between these two systems of colonial rule?   

The biggest difference that I can see between these systems was that Japan made considerable effort to educate the natives of Taiwan, and they developed an educational system in Taiwan as highly as that they had on the Japanese mainland. They even had one imperial university, which is the highest education any Japanese could have, in Taiwan. Taiwanese people were free to go to any university in Japan if they could win in the competitive entrance examination, and this was the reason that I was able to go to one of the most prestigious medical school in Japan (the Jikei University School of Medicine, which took only one student out of every 50 applicants). When Japanese colonial rule ended at the end of World War II, the Taiwanese people were as well educated as the Japanese and they were able to develop a well-industrialized country and a well developed medical system to deal with infectious diseases on their own.  

What happened in many African countries was quite different. The European colonial powers were not interested in educating people of Africa. They used Africa primarily as places to extract natural resources to enrich themselves, and when World War II ended, most countries in Africa did not have the technological know-how to develop their own resources. Whenever they wanted to develop their own resources, such as minerals and oils, they had to depend on foreign companies, most of them either European or American. Most of the money earned with these resources went to these foreign companies. Although these foreign companies usually paid some fees for extracting these resources, the money did not do any good to the people of these African countries. They usually went into the pockets of a small number of ruling political families.  

In the fight against NTDs, Dr. Hotez mentioned "substantial contributions from both the G8 nations and prominent private philantropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations." These financial aids are fine, but they are still temporary Band-Aids that come and go according to the fashion of the day in international politics. The only way to solve the NTD problem in Africa is to educate the people in Africa to the level that they can handle the problem themselves. Education requires money, and the only permanent source of money these people have is their resources, which are being exploited by foreign companies.  

The only way to stop this type of exploitation is to stop all of these exploitation of resources by foreigners. These countries should be encouraged to set up their own companies to exploit their own resources, and the money that comes from these companies should go to develop the education system instead of going to the pockets of local politicians. This is the only way that I can see to deal with NTDs effectively on a permanent basis. Financial aid from foreigners are temporary things that come and go and this should not be a basis for solving this problem.  

Pinghui V. Liu  
Professor of Microbiology Emeritus  
University of Louisville School of Medicine  
533 NE Wavecrest Ct.  
Boca Raton, Fla.  
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