In this article the authors argue that the global neglected tropical diseases (NTD) community should be doing more to leverage the public health and university laboratories that were very involved in COVID-19 testing early in the pandemic, as these laboratories now run the risk of being underutilised as COVID-19 testing wanes.
The authors make a case for repurposing many of these laboratories to support control programmes for NTDs in endemic countries as they contemplate how to strengthen laboratory capacity for all endemic and emerging epidemiological diseases.
© 2025 Sightsavers. Registered charity numbers 207544 and SC038110
To make sure you have a great experience on our site, we’d like your consent to use cookies. These will collect anonymous statistics to personalise your experience.
You have the option to enable non-essential cookies, which will help us enhance your experience and improve our website.
These enable our site to work correctly, for example by storing page settings. You can disable these by changing your browser settings, but some parts of our website will not work as expected.
To improve our website, we’d like to collect anonymous data about how you use the site, such as which pages you read, the device you’re using, and whether your visit includes a donation. This is completely anonymous, and is never used to profile individual visitors.
To raise awareness about our work, we’d like to show you Sightsavers adverts as you browse the web. By accepting these cookies, our advertising partners may use anonymous information to show you our adverts on other websites you visit. If you do not enable advertising cookies, you will still see adverts on other websites, but they may be less relevant to you. For info, see the Google Ads privacy policy.