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Measles causes a substantial disease burden for all countries, while mortality is greatest in underserved, marginalized populations. Global measles eradication is feasible and the strategies critically rely upon well-functioning national immunisation programs and surveillance systems. All six regions of the World Health Organisation have adopted measles elimination targets. The Rule of Rescue and the principle of justice leave no ethical place for health programs, governments, global public health bodies or donors to hide if they impede efforts to eradicate measles globally by not taking all necessary actions to establish a global eradication target and committing the resources essential to achieve this goal., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.)

National onchocerciasis elimination committees (NOECs) serve to help ministries of health complete the pathway to successful verification of elimination of onchocerciasis (river blindness), as outlined in the 2016 World Health Organization guidelines. These guidelines, however, only take effect when the country believes it has reached a point that elimination can be demonstrated, and do not address the preceding milestones. Therefore, NOECs can be of great help with guiding and tailoring earlier planning, programming and assessments to empower national programs to aggressively move toward their countries' elimination goals. In this article, we provide suggestions for organizing NOECs and examples of four such committees that have successfully operated in Africa and the Americas.

An essential component in achieving accepted successful elimination of a disease or a pathogen involves the acquisition of quality-assured (QA) data that ultimately define the absence of infection or transmission in previously endemic areas. The acquisition of these essential data, in the case of onchocerciasis elimination, requires strong laboratory support for both testing and continuing evaluation/validation of the tools used for the required diagnostic and epidemiology procedures. There is also a need for standardization of the laboratory-based and field-based assays used across the onchocerciasis-endemic countries as well as continuing technical, fiscal and logistical support for laboratory activities. To achieve these needs, it is proposed to build on the existing onchocerciasis programme laboratory activities in the endemic areas by expanding these to include additional laboratories as referral services organized on a regional basis to support the needs of endemic countries. Included in these plans are the development of quality assurance mechanisms, supply chain procedures and standardization of protocols for the basic assays needed for both national onchocerciasis elimination programme surveys and supporting research activities. Such an entity could then include quality-assured testing for other neglected tropical diseases.