Northeastern University professor Richard Wamai was walking with two students in the scenic Tungen Hills above the Rift Valley in Kenya this month when he met a man who described being stricken by a horrific tropical disease, elephantiasis. The man pointed to a tree trunk and said his leg had swollen to a size just as large. Although the man recovered from the acute stage, he told Wamai he’d lost feeling in his legs and toes and could no longer wear shoes.
“There’s a stigma,” says Wamai, who will help lead the annual meeting of the New England Neglected Tropical Diseases Consortium on Wednesday, Sept. 25, at Novartis Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wamai co-founded the organization with a colleague at Boston University five years ago.
