"Schistosomes are here. People and livestock are strictly prohibited from entering the water!", a warning painted on a Yangtze levee in Honghu, Hubei, China Many countries are working towards eradicating the disease. The World Health Organization is promoting these efforts. In some cases, urbanization, pollution, and the consequent destruction of snail habitat have reduced exposure, with a subsequent decrease in new infections. The elimination of snail populations using molluscicides had been attempted to prevent<unk>  in the past, but it was an expensive process that often only reduce but not eliminate the snail population. The drug praziquantel is used for prevention in high-risk populations living in areas where the disease is common. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises avoiding drinking or coming into contact with contaminated water in areas where<unk>  is common. A 2014 review found tentative evidence that increasing access to clean water and sanitation reduces schistosome infection. Other important preventive measures include hygiene education leading to behavioral change and sanitary engineering to ensure safe water supply. Preventive chemotherapy For<unk>  control, World Health Organization recommends preventive chemotherapy, which is treatment of entire affected population and periodic treatment of all groups at high-risk at acquiring<unk>  with use of Praziquantel. In 2019, 44.5% of people with<unk>  was treated globally, and 67.2% of school-aged children needed preventive chemotherapy received treatment. Snails, dams, and prawns For many years from the 1950s onwards, vast dams and irrigation schemes were constructed, causing a massive rise in water-borne infections from<unk> . The detailed specifications laid out in various United Nations documents since the 1950s could have minimized this problem. Irrigation schemes can be designed to make it hard for the snails to colonize the water and to reduce the contact with the local population. Even though guidelines on how to design these schemes to minimise the spread of the disease had been published years before, the designers were unaware of them. The dams appear to have reduced the population of the large migratory prawn Macrobrachium, which eats the snails. After the construction of fourteen large dams, greater increases in<unk>  occurred in the historical habitats of native prawns than in other areas. Further, at the 1986 Diama Dam on the Senegal River, restoring prawns upstream of the dam reduced both snail density and the human<unk>  reinfection rate. Integrated strategy in China In China, the national strategy for<unk>  control has shifted three times since it was first initiated: transmission control strategy (from mid-1950s to early 1980s), morbidity control strategy (from mid-1980s to 2003), and the "new integrated strategy" (2004 to present). The morbidity control strategy focused on synchronous chemotherapy for humans and bovines and the new strategy developed in 2004 intervenes in the transmission pathway of<unk> , mainly including replacement of bovines with machines, prohibition of grazing cattle in the grasslands, improving sanitation, installation of fecal-matter containers on boats, praziquantel drug therapy, snail control, and health education. A 2018 review found that the "new integrated strategy" was highly effective to reduce the rate of S. japonicum infection in both humans and the intermediate host snails and reduced the infection risk by 3–4 times relative to the conventional strategy.
Schistosomiasis
Toxocariasis
Trypanosomiasis
Filariasis
Cyclosporiasis
Cryptosporidiosis
Tylosis
Acariasis