The Decatur-based Task Force for Global Health has received a five-year grant of nearly $28.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to focus more extensively on neglected tropical diseases.

The grant is to enable the recently established Task Force’s Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center to collaborate with other similarly focused programs including those of the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria Center for Global Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Research is essential to accomplish the goals of the London Declaration,” Patrick Lammie, senior scientist at the CDC, said in a news release, referring to a pledge signed last year by a wide range of non-governmental institutions and pharmaceutical companies to combat these diseases.

Dr. Lammie is to be the principal investigator on the grant, joining the team at the Task Force led by Eric Ottesen and Dominique Kyelem.

Dr. Kyelem, who is originally from Burkina Faso,  cited the following disease as examples of neglected tropical diseases that plague various countries in Africa: disabling elephantiasis, river blindness, schistosomiasis, intestinal parasite and blinding trachoma.

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