By Dr. Luz Mendoza
Tropical disease research is the systematic study of infections that hit warm, humid regions hardest—dengue, malaria, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, soil-transmitted helminths. Related terms you will hear a lot are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), global health financing, research capacity building, and health equity. For Spanish-speaking students and professionals in Peru, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is the reason a lab in Iquitos may have a PCR machine but no budget for primers, or why a field team in Madre de Dios can map mosquito breeding sites but cannot afford fuel for a second visit. Understanding underfunding matters because it shapes which questions get asked, which communities get answers, and which students can build careers in science without leaving the country.
The Funding Gap Is Not a Mystery—It Is a Market Failure
Most biomedical research gets funded because someone expects a return: a pharmaceutical company sees a market, a government sees a political priority, or a donor sees a measurable outcome. Tropical diseases often fail all three tests. The people most affected tend to live in rural or peri-urban areas with limited purchasing power. The diseases themselves are chronic, disabling, or fatal in ways that do not generate urgent headlines. And the interventions—vector control, improved housing, sanitation, early diagnosis—are less photogenic than a new drug or vaccine.
In Peru, this plays out in concrete ways. A study on Leishmania in the Andean foothills may require weeks of travel, cold-chain transport for samples, and coordination with communities that speak Quechua or Awajún. The cost per data point is high. The number of peer-reviewed publications may be modest. For a funding agency that measures success in papers per dollar, the project looks inefficient. For a community facing mucocutaneous leishmaniasis, the project is essential.
How Funding Flows—and Where It Stops
To understand underfunding, it helps to follow the money through three common channels.
1. International Grants and the “Partnership” Illusion
Large grants from organizations like the World Health Organization, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or the U.S. National Institutes of Health often require collaboration between a high-income institution and a low- or middle-income one. In theory, this builds capacity. In practice, the Peruvian partner may receive a subcontract that covers sample collection but not the salaries of senior investigators, the maintenance of equipment, or the training of students. The intellectual leadership often stays in the global north. The result is a project that produces data but does not build a self-sustaining research group.
I have seen this in my own work. A well-funded international study on dengue seroprevalence in Piura hired local nurses and drivers, paid for ELISA kits, and produced a useful dataset. But when the grant ended, the freezers were full of samples no one had money to analyze. The local university gained no new faculty position. The students who helped with data entry moved to Lima or abroad. The research question was answered, but the research capacity was not strengthened.
2. National Budgets and the “Emergency Only” Pattern
Peru’s national science council, CONCYTEC, has made real efforts to fund research through programs like FONDECYT. But the overall public investment in research and development remains below 0.2% of GDP, far below the Latin American average and dramatically below the 2–3% seen in high-income countries. When dengue outbreaks spike after El Niño, emergency funds appear. When the outbreak fades, the funding disappears. This creates a boom-and-bust cycle that is terrible for long-term studies.
Think of it like preparing ceviche. You cannot wait until the fish is already spoiling to buy ice. You need a cold chain from the moment the boat lands. Tropical disease surveillance works the same way. You need continuous monitoring, trained personnel, and maintained equipment before the outbreak. Emergency funding is the ice bought at the last minute—better than nothing, but not a system.
3. Private Philanthropy and the “Disease of the Year” Effect
Private donors often focus on a single disease or a single intervention. This can produce impressive results for that disease—think of the global push against malaria in the 2000s. But it can also distort local priorities. A foundation may fund a sophisticated genomic study of Plasmodium vivax in the Amazon while the same region lacks basic microscopy services. The research is valuable, but the mismatch between donor interests and local needs is real.
In Peru, this is visible in the contrast between well-funded HIV and tuberculosis programs and the chronic neglect of soil-transmitted helminths or leptospirosis. All are important. But the funding does not follow the burden of disease. It follows the visibility of the disease.
What Underfunding Looks Like in a Peruvian Lab
Let me describe a typical week. On Monday, I teach a molecular biology class at a public university in Lima. The students are sharp, curious, and bilingual in Spanish and English. They can explain PCR and CRISPR. But the lab has one working thermocycler for forty students. The pipettes are calibrated once a year, if at all. The reagents are shared, stretched, and sometimes expired.
On Tuesday, I review data from a collaborator in the Amazon. The samples were collected six months ago. They were stored in a freezer that lost power twice during the rainy season. The DNA is degraded. The data will be noisy. The collaborator apologizes, but the problem is not her skill—it is the absence of a reliable electrical grid and a maintenance budget.
On Wednesday, I write a grant proposal. I ask for money to study the microbial ecology of chicha fermentation as a model for understanding how Lactobacillus species compete with enteric pathogens. It is a good idea, grounded in local practice and relevant to child health. But the proposal will compete against hundreds of others. The success rate for national grants in Peru is below 15%. I will probably not get funded. I will revise and resubmit. That is the job.
The Hidden Costs That Funding Formulas Ignore
Funding agencies like to see direct costs: salaries, equipment, travel. But tropical disease research has hidden costs that are rarely reimbursed.
- Language and translation: Consent forms must be in Spanish and often in Quechua or other Indigenous languages. Community meetings require interpreters. This is ethically necessary but adds time and money.
- Logistics and infrastructure: Reaching a field site may require a boat, a motorcycle, and a two-hour walk. Samples must be kept cold. Power outages are common. These costs are real but hard to itemize in a budget template designed in Geneva or Washington.
- Training and retention: A well-trained field technician in Iquitos is worth her weight in gold. But if her salary is paid by a short-term grant, she will leave for a more stable job. Every departure is a loss of tacit knowledge—how to navigate the river, how to build trust with a community, how to spot a false-negative rapid test.
- Publication costs: Open-access journals often charge article processing fees of $1,000–$3,000. For a Peruvian lab, that is a month of salaries. The result is that good data may sit unpublished, invisible to the global scientific community.
Why This Matters for Students and Early-Career Scientists
If you are a biology student in Peru, you have probably been told that the best path is to leave: do a master’s in Europe, a PhD in the United States, and maybe return someday. This brain drain is a direct consequence of underfunding. When local labs cannot offer stable salaries, mentorship, or equipment, talented people leave. The country loses not only their skills but also their questions—the questions that come from growing up in a place where dengue is a yearly reality and where your grandmother treats a fever with matico leaves before she trusts a clinic.
I do not blame anyone for leaving. I did it myself. I trained abroad, learned techniques that were not available in Peru, and came back. But I came back to a system that still struggles to support the work I want to do. The solution is not to guilt-trip young scientists into staying. The solution is to make staying a viable choice.
What Could Change: Evidence-Based Levers
I am cautious about proposing grand solutions. The evidence on research funding is complex, and I do not want to overpromise. But there are a few levers that have shown promise in other settings and deserve attention in Peru.
1. Long-Term, Flexible Funding for Local Institutions
Short-term project grants are useful for answering specific questions. They are terrible for building institutions. A five-year grant that allows a Peruvian university to hire a faculty member, maintain equipment, and train students would do more for tropical disease research than ten one-year projects. This is not a radical idea. It is how strong research groups are built everywhere.
2. South-South Collaboration
Peru does not need to rely only on partnerships with the United States or Europe. Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have strong tropical disease research programs. Sharing protocols, reagents, and training across Latin America could reduce costs and build regional capacity. The Amazon basin is a shared ecosystem. The diseases do not respect borders. Neither should the research networks.
3. Community-Based Research Models
In some parts of Peru, communities are already involved in vector surveillance and data collection. This is not just a cost-saving measure. It is a way to make research more relevant and more ethical. When a community helps design a study, the study is more likely to ask the right questions and to produce results that are actually used. This is not a substitute for professional scientists. It is a complement.
4. Open Data and Open Protocols
Every time a Peruvian lab reinvents a protocol because the original is behind a paywall, money is wasted. Open-access publishing, open data repositories, and open protocols are not just ideals. They are practical tools for stretching limited resources. I have used protocols shared by Brazilian and Indian colleagues that saved me months of troubleshooting. I try to share my own in return.
The Role of Communication and Journalism
Underfunding is also a communication problem. Tropical diseases are often invisible in the media until there is an outbreak. Between outbreaks, the slow work of surveillance, basic research, and capacity building does not make headlines. This blog is one small attempt to change that. By translating peer-reviewed research into Spanish and connecting it to Peruvian ecosystems, I hope to make the case for sustained investment—not with alarmism, but with evidence.
When I write about a new study on Aedes aegypti insecticide resistance, I am not just summarizing a paper. I am showing that the mosquito in your backyard is evolving, and that the people studying it need resources. When I explain how chicha fermentation can teach us about microbial competition, I am arguing that local knowledge and local questions deserve funding. This is not advocacy in the sense of lobbying. It is advocacy in the sense of making the invisible visible.
What You Can Do
If you are a student, ask your professors about their funding. Ask them what they would study if they had the money. Those questions are the seeds of future research agendas. If you are a professional, consider mentoring a student from a Peruvian university. A single email exchange about a protocol or a career path can change a trajectory. If you are a policymaker, look at the budget line for research and ask whether it matches the burden of disease in your region. If you are a journalist, write about the lab that closed, not just the outbreak that happened.
None of this is a quick fix. I am not going to pretend that a blog post will change global health financing. But I do believe that a steady stream of clear, evidence-based communication can shift the conversation. It can make underfunding feel less like an abstract policy failure and more like a concrete problem with concrete solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are tropical diseases underfunded compared to other diseases?
Tropical diseases often affect people with limited purchasing power, which reduces the commercial incentive for pharmaceutical research. They also tend to be chronic or endemic rather than epidemic, which makes them less visible in media and politics. Funding agencies may prioritize diseases with higher mortality rates in high-income countries or with clearer opportunities for high-impact publications. The result is a persistent mismatch between disease burden and research investment.
How does underfunding affect the quality of tropical disease research in Peru?
Underfunding affects quality in several ways. It limits the ability to maintain equipment, purchase reagents, and retain trained staff. It forces researchers to rely on short-term grants that do not support long-term studies. It also contributes to brain drain, as talented scientists leave for better-funded institutions abroad. The research that does get done is often excellent, but it is done under constant financial strain.
What can be done to improve funding for tropical disease research?
Several approaches have shown promise. Long-term, flexible funding for local institutions can build sustainable research capacity. South-South collaboration can reduce costs and share expertise. Community-based research models can make studies more relevant and efficient. Open data and open protocols can reduce duplication of effort. None of these is a silver bullet, but together they can shift the system toward greater equity and effectiveness.
Is it true that emergency funding for outbreaks actually hurts long-term research?
Emergency funding is necessary and often saves lives. But when it is the only funding available, it creates a boom-and-bust cycle. Researchers may shift their focus to whatever disease is currently in the news, abandoning long-term projects. When the emergency ends, the funding disappears, and the infrastructure built during the emergency may collapse. The ideal is a stable baseline of funding that can be supplemented by emergency funds when needed.
A Note on Confidence and Uncertainty
I want to be explicit about what I know and what I do not know. The broad patterns of underfunding are well documented in global health literature. The specific examples from Peru are based on my own experience and conversations with colleagues, not on a systematic survey. I have not quantified the exact funding gap for every tropical disease in Peru, and I would be cautious about any number that claims to do so. The mechanisms I describe—market failure, short-term grants, brain drain—are supported by evidence, but their relative importance varies by disease, region, and institution. I am confident that underfunding is a real and serious problem. I am less confident about which specific interventions will work best in the Peruvian context. That is a question for research, not for rhetoric.
Next Steps for This Blog
This article is the first in a series on research funding and capacity in Peru. In future posts, I will look at specific diseases—leishmaniasis, leptospirosis, soil-transmitted helminths—and trace how funding decisions have shaped what we know and what we do not know. I will also write about the researchers who are doing excellent work despite the constraints, and about the students who are choosing to stay. If you have a question about tropical disease research in Peru, or a story about how funding has affected your work, I would like to hear it. The comment section is open, and I read everything.
Dr. Luz Mendoza is a molecular biologist and science communicator based in Lima, Peru. She writes about tropical health, microbial ecology, and the everyday science of Peruvian ecosystems.