A few days ago a national newspaper reported that the Spanish Ministry of Health had detected ticks with Crimean-Congo fever in four communities. Months earlier, this disease had caused the death of a man in our country. On 18 April, the prestigious Financial Times published article graduate "A mysterious outbreak of leishmaniasis in Spain". It reported on the research carried out by several scientists in Fuenlabrada to detect the causes of the increase in cases of the disease in this district of Madrid.

Ebola, Zika, dengue fever... join a list of ailments that we thought were distant but are no longer so distant. According to the World Health Organisation, these are neglected tropical diseases whose impact on global wellbeing becomes more significant as they come closer to our homes, to those we know.

In a globalised world where travelling from one end of the world to the other is becoming less and less costly in every way, to imagine that diseases or their carriers do not move with us would be naïve thinking, to say the least. Millions of people move every day, and so do the pathogens that could claim victims in the first and third world.

Likewise, the questionable climate change and other factors such as subject undoubtedly influence the transmission of pathologies that can no longer be considered local or local and that are often largely unknown to a large part of the population despite the fact that they affect 1 billion people, more than 70% of whom live in low- and lower-middle-income countries. 

For this reason, research into these ailments is a necessity that cannot wait. At the high school Tropical Health of the University of Navarra (ISTUN) we believe in this commitment and we are firmly committed to science as an antidote. As a result, on 4 and 5 May we will be hosting the IV Tropical Health Symposium under the title degree scroll 'Priorities in tropical health and parasite-borne diseases: new drugs, new therapeutic targets and forms of administration'.

International experts from countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Kenya, Colombia, Turkey, Cameroon, Iran, Greece and Saudi Arabia, to name but a few, will meet in Pamplona to share the latest advances in pathologies that inevitably sound closer to home. Malaria, which this week celebrated World Malaria Day, leishmaniasis, brucellosis and Chagas disease, among others, will be the focus of the scientific and university discussion during two conference dedicated to proposing solutions for the future and in which more than fifty works from research will be presented in this field.

We are faced with a challenge of often unfathomable dimensions. Once again, and although it may sound repetitive, all efforts are too little and relying on science can bring a fresh and different approach to the problem. That is why knowing how some of these diseases are tackled elsewhere is vital. Progress in Cameroon, Paris or Barcelona is progress for everyone in an ever-changing environment.

In fact, the Financial Times ' aforementioned article reference letter referred to the work of the two scientists from Madrid who investigated the causes of the increase in leishmaniasis. After following several leads like true detectives, they came to the conclusion that the Fuenlabrada outbreak was "an example of how several social and environmental factors, not significant in themselves, can cause an epidemic". "It would have been almost impossible to anticipate," added one of them.

The challenges are undoubtedly numerous and ever-changing, but research is always a good solution for tropical, but above all travelling, diseases.