Citation: Hotez PJ, Sabin AB, Molyneux DH, Fenwick A, Ottesen E, et al. (2006) Authors' Reply. PLoS Med 3(4): e207. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030207
Published: April 25, 2006
Copyright: © 2006 Hotez et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this article.
Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
Damian Walker and Godfrey Walker  make a strong case for adding congenital syphilis to our proposed list of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Indeed, we would hasten to add all of the major treponemal infections—including yaws, endemic syphilis (bejel), and pinta—could potentially qualify as NTDs. Leptospirosis and bartonellosis might also qualify as important neglected bacterial infections, while amoebiasis is an important yet neglected protozoan infection. Therefore, it is possible that in the future our list of 13–15 NTDs could expand to approximately 20 conditions. In the meantime, we are working to establish a set of consensus guidelines for this important list of NTDs.