Fighting Disease:  Dominican Republic

Catalyzing Disease Elimination in the Caribbean

In September 2008, The Carter Center, in partnership with the Dominican Republic and Haiti, launched a historic 18-month initiative to help the two countries and their other partners to accelerate the elimination of two mosquito-borne infections — malaria and lymphatic filariasis — from Hispaniola, the last reservoir of these devastating diseases in the Caribbean. As long as lymphatic filariasis and malaria exist on any part of these two nations' shared island, they will threaten the rest of the Caribbean with tragic human and economic consequences.

Read about the Hispaniola Initiative >

The initiative stems from a 2006 recommendation of the Carter Center's International Task Force for Disease Eradication (ITFDE) — a group of 12 global experts on infectious disease — that it is "technically feasible, medically desirable, and would be economically beneficial" to eliminate these two parasitic diseases from Hispaniola. (Read the updated ITFDE recommendation from 2008.) The binational project broke new ground in collaborations between these two countries for the betterment of public health on the entire island. (Read the 2008 Carter Center Press Release: Carter Center Launches Effort To Spur Elimination of Malaria and Lymphatic Filariasis in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.) Read full text >