About Us

About The END Initiative at Northeastern

In the fall of 2013, a speaker from the Sabin Vaccine Institute came to speak at a conference hosted at Northeastern. She spoke about neglected tropical diseases – widespread diseases that have high morbidity but low mortality. Several students and faculty in the audience were inspired by her talk and formed END7 at Northeastern, which was granted official club recognition in early 2015.

The Fall of 2017, we renamed our club The End Neglected Diseases (END) Initiative and started supporting Deworm the World, an initiative by Evidence Action. Deworm the World is ranked highly by GiveWell and does an excellent job of providing mass drug administration of medications that treat and prevent the most common NTDs in schools where the diseases are common.

We meet on Wednesdays at 6 PM in 411 Ell. We also hold events and fundraisers, advocate, volunteer and spread awareness in the Boston community. Look at our calendar of events for more information and check out our current officers.

Our Mission in a nutshell

The END Initiative at Northeastern’s mission is to advocate, raise awareness and funds toward eliminating the five most common neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). We strive to create awareness of the effects of NTDs throughout our campus and to empower the members of our campus to create change.

More about neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)

NTDs are some of the most common diseases of the world’s poor and affect over half a billion children  in the developing world. Unlike high-profile diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, NTDs have relatively low mortality but high morbidity, meaning they cause sickness but aren’t often fatal. Instead, they disable and disfigure, preventing adults from working and kids from going to school, keeping entire communities trapped in a cycle of poverty.

The 5 diseases we focus on are elephantiasissnail fever, roundwormwhipworm and hookworm. While there are other NTDs, these are 5 that are most common and that we know can be easily treated and prevented. In fact, the drugs to treat these diseases have already been donated, making the cost effectively 50 cents per person to treat and protect them from these diseases for a year. Controlling and eliminating NTDs provides foundation to ensure that efforts to aid nutrition, education, health and economic productivity are successful. Prevention and treatment of NTDs is critical to ending extreme poverty.

The video below does an excellent job of summarizing what Deworm the World is all about.