Time for noma to enter the global health stage

Noma is a unique public health challenge, which for far too long has been as invisible as the highly vulnerable population group of children affected. In the absence of reliable epidemiological data, the WHO noma estimations from 1998 remain the most widely cited by government planners, concerned non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and academia. This lends high relevance to Anaïs Leonie Galli and colleagues' 1 Galli A Brugger C Fürst T Monnier N Winkler M Steinmann P Prevalence, incidence and reported global distribution of noma: systematic review of recent studies. Lancet Infect Dis. 2022; (published online March 15.)https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00698-8 Summary Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (4) Google Scholar systematic review of epidemiological data since 1998, and global occurrence of noma from 1950 to 2019. However, the excellent effort of the systematic review does not solve the epidemiological riddles because of absent or low-quality data. Nevertheless, the authors confirm the hotspot countries in sub-Saharan Africa and add previously unreported cases in southeast Asia and South America, bringing the total to 23 countries with observed noma cases over the past 10 years. Prevalence, incidence, and reported global distribution of noma: a systematic literature reviewNoma (cancrum oris) is a severely debilitating orofacial disease. The global annual incidence and prevalence figures of noma are outdated and were not based on epidemiological studies. Therefore, we systematically reviewed the scientific literature about the prevalence, incidence, and reported global distribution of noma. We searched ten databases and Google Scholar from 1950 up to Sept 23, 2020. We used an adapted Newcastle–Ottawa scale for quality assessment of the studies we included. Epidemiological data could be extracted from eight publications. Full-Text PDF