National School of Tropical Medicine Public Policy

Public policy and advocacy represent a key fourth component of the mission of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine. NSTM and its faculty have a distinguished track record of raising awareness about the importance of neglected tropical diseases both overseas and within the United States and have organized high profile conferences and panels, as well as helped to formulate public policy on Capitol Hill, in the UK Parliament, and in the Texas State Legislature. NSTM collaborates with key public policy organizations in Houston and in Texas including the Baylor Healthcare Policy Institute, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, and The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas.

NSTM faculty advocate increased awareness, education, and allocation of resources to fight neglected tropical diseases, neglected infections of poverty, and emerging infectious diseases and effect their reduction, elimination, and eradication. View related publications:

• Global “worming”: Climate change and its projected general impact on human helminth infections
• WHO and Its Enduring Commitment to Global Pediatrics
• Averting collapse: Reimagining the NTDs ecosystem through G20 health diplomacy and science innovation
• Neglected Parasitic Infections and Poverty in the United States
• Neglected tropical disease vaccines: hookworm, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis

Led by Dr. Hotez, NSTM faculty advocate increased education around vaccines and communication of science in the United States and here in Texas. View related publications and media coverage:

• Anti-science extremism in America: escalating and globalizing
• It won't end with COVID: Countering the next phase of American antivaccine activism 2025-29
• Measles, Mumps, Rubella Immunization and the Resurgence of Measles in America
• Modeling Reemergence of Vaccine-Eliminated Infectious Diseases Under Declining Vaccination in the US

NSTM leaders advocate cooperation among scientific communities from other countries, including those countries with whom the U.S. does not have entirely good relations, in order to maximize scientific efforts through cooperation. Among other projects NSTM partners with University of Malaya and the government of Botswana  for capacity building and training in the area of vaccine development. View related publications:

• Science tikkun: a bioscience pandemic framework in a Hebrew tradition of global repair
• Vaccine Science Diplomacy and "The Phenomenon of Man"
• Blue Marble Health: An Innovative Plan to Fight Diseases of the Poor amid Wealth
• “Vaccine Diplomacy”: Historical Perspectives and Future Directions
• The NTDs and Vaccine Diplomacy in Latin America: Opportunities for United States Foreign Policy

NSTM Faculty are authorities on disease outbreaks including Chikungunya, , West Nile, yellow fever, and others, and are important sources of information in the scientific community as well as to local, national, and global audiences regarding new and emerging infectious diseases.

• Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Anthropocene: The Cases of Zika, Ebola, and Other Infections
• Yellow Jack's Potential Return to the American South
• Vaccines in a time of global boiling and megacities
• Venezuela's humanitarian crisis, resurgence of vector-borne diseases, and implications for spillover in the region
• What’s with these Vector-borne Neglected Tropical Diseases?

NSTM advocates the open-access model of scholarly publishing to facilitate scientific discovery. Faculty make an effort to have their scholarly research published through open access; in addition, Dr. Hotez is editor-in-chief of Public Library of Science NTDs, the first open-access journal dedicated to neglected tropical diseases.

To see a complete listing of Dr. Hotez' peer-reviewed publications, go to his My NCBI page.