The global priorities in the field of infectious diseases are constantly changing. While emerging viral infections have regularly dominated public health attention, which has only intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous bacterial diseases have previously caused, and continue to cause, significant morbidity and mortality-deserving equal attention. Three potentially life-threatening endemic bacterial diseases (leptospirosis, melioidosis, and rickettsioses) are a huge public health concern especially in low- and middle-income countries. Despite their continued threat, these diseases do not receive proportionate attention from global health organizations and are not even included on the WHO list of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). This, in turn, has led to a vicious circle of neglect with continued, yet conceivably preventable, hospitalizations and deaths each year especially in the vulnerable population. This is a call from a group of multi-institutional experts on the urgent need to directly address the circle of neglect and raise support in terms of funding, research, surveillance, diagnostics, and therapeutics to alleviate the burden of these 3 diseases.
Copyright: © 2025 Tshokey et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.