Slum Health: Diseases of Neglected Populations

Dear Colleagues,

The most notable and glaringly apparent feature of the two recent explosive epidemics of infectious diseases—Ebola and Zika—was the virtual absence of any scientific discussion about the populations that were disproportionately affected by these diseases—residents of urban slums. Today, more than one billion people in the world live in urban slums defined by the United Nations Expert Group as human settlements with (1) inadequate access to safe water, (2) inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure, (3) poor structural quality of housing, (4) overcrowding, and (5) insecure residential status. The Millenium Development Goal 7D called for efforts to achieve "a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers", by 2020. By 2020, the number of just new slum dwellers will exceed 100 million. While the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 recognized the existence of populations residing in urban slums, the health of these populations was considered only in the context of larger urban health concerns. Slum-specific health research is under-represented and usually buried within the framework of larger urban health research. As such, interventions proposed to alleviate health problems of slum residents are often non-specific, not evidence based, and ineffective. Not only are slum dwellers and slum communities neglected economically, politically, socially, and by the mass media, but also are rarely subjects of health research.

This Special Issue on Slum Health is dedicated to the discussion of approaches that provide better understanding of infectious and non-communicable disease problems that disproportionately burden slum residents of large urban centers of the world. It will highlight research questions that specifically deal with diseases overly represented in slums, distinct from non-slum urban communities. Community-based clinical, epidemiologic, environmental, social, and laboratory-based studies conducted by professional health researchers in partnership with slum community residents will be emphasized. The goal of this Special Issue is to bring attention to the research community of the world the need to recognize the existence of this large proportion of human population that thus far has remained in the shadows, not only of urban development, but also of scientific investigations.

Prof. Lee Riley
Prof. Jason Corburn
Guest Editors

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• Slums
• Slum health
• Favelas
• Slum dwellers
• Informal settlements
• Urbanization
• Neglected populations