Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the response by Lord Bates on 3 April (HL Deb, cols 930–1) concerning neglected tropical diseases, what further progress they expect to make in the elimination of sleeping sickness.

The World Health Organization aims to eliminate sleeping sickness as a public health problem by 2020, building on the reduction from 300,000 new cases per year in 1995 to fewer than 3,000 in 2015. The UK supports this effort through research into better ways to diagnose and treat sleeping sickness, for example development of the first ever rapid diagnostic test through the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), and an improved, less toxic new treatment through the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND).