1025 - Advancing the Elimination of Schistosomiasis
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease transmitted to human hosts via freshwater snails. It can cause serious and debilitating chronic conditions, but the Pan American Health Organization is leading a charge to end transmission in the Americas. In this episode: PAHO Parasitologist Ronaldo Scholte details how locations like Puerto Rico are successfully working to eliminate schistosomiasis.
Guest:
Ronaldo Scholte, PhD, MS, is a technical officer at the Pan American Health Organization where he oversees efforts to treat and eliminate neglected tropical diseases.
Host:
Dr. Josh Sharfstein is distinguished professor of the practice in Health Policy and Management, a pediatrician, and former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.
Show links and related content:
-
Schistosomiasis—WHO
-
Tracking the last signs of Schistosomiasis in Puerto Rico—PAHO
-
Ending Neglect of Tropical Diseases—Public Health On Call (March 2025)
Transcript information:
Looking for episode transcripts? Open our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app (desktop or mobile) or the Spotify mobile app to access an auto-generated transcript of any episode. Closed captioning is also available for every episode on our YouTube channel.
Contact us:
Have a question about something you heard? Looking for a transcript? Want to suggest a topic or guest? Contact us via email or visit our website.
Follow us:
-
Here's our RSS feed
Note: These podcasts are a conversation between the participants, and do not represent the position of Johns Hopkins University.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jh.u.org for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:31.2 | It's Lindsay Smith Rogers. |
| 0:33.2 | Today, the elimination of schistosomiasis in the Americas. |
| 0:37.2 | Dr. Ronaldo Schulte is a technical officer on the neglected tropical disease team of the Pan American Health Organization. |
| 0:44.0 | He talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about this parasitic disease and its complications, as well as the incredible effort over decades to push the infection to the brink of elimination in Puerto Rico. |
| 0:55.3 | Let's listen. |
| 0:56.3 | Dr. Ronaldo Schulte, thank you so much for joining me today in Public Health on call. |
| 1:01.0 | How are you? |
| 1:02.0 | Good. |
| 1:02.6 | Thank you very much for having me. |
| 1:04.2 | Now, you work at the Pan American Health Organization. |
| 1:07.3 | What is your job there? |
| 1:08.6 | Yeah, I'm a technical officer in the Paro, how we call it. |
| 1:13.6 | And what I do is I try to give to the member states, the countries, help for them to achieve their goals. |
| 1:22.6 | On my specific role, I work with biocytic diseases and the four on my portfolio are set for elimination. |
| 1:31.7 | So I assist the countries to achieve the goals of the elimination by 2030. |
| 1:37.8 | Eliminating parasitic diseases, that sounds like a very good thing to do. What does |
| 1:41.9 | elimination mean? Well, we have two types of elimination. We |
| 1:46.9 | have elimination as a public health problem where we reduce the burden of the disease on certain |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.