Navajo reservations are one of the areas hard hit by unchecked infectious disease. (Image by jclarson.)

Miller-McCune has an incredibly distressing report about diseases, usually associated with third-world nations, that are flourishing in the poverty-stricken areas of the United States. They keep poor people within a cycle of poverty, and worse yet, epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control haven’t been tracking the illnesses. (Thanks Instapaper.) An excerpt:

“Millions of poor Americans living in distressed regions of the country are chronically sick, afflicted by a host of hidden diseases that are not being monitored, diagnosed or treated, researchers say.

From Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the segregated inner cities of the Great Lakes and Northeast, they say, and from Navajo reservations to Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexico border, more than 20 chronic diseases are promoting the cycle of poverty in conditions of inadequate sanitation, unsafe water supplies and rundown housing.

‘These are forgotten diseases among forgotten people,’ said Peter Hotez, a microbiologist at George Washington University, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Sabin Vaccine Institute and co-founder of the institute’s Global Network for Neglected Tropical Disease Control. ‘If these were diseases among middle-class whites in the suburbs, we would not tolerate them. They are among America’s greatest health disparities, and they are largely unknown to the U.S. medical and health communities.’”