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About this Status Report

Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is a truly global problem, causing premature death and disability in almost every region of the world. However, even RHD experts have several unanswered questions and RHD remains completely unknown by many people, despite it being a major cause of premature death in children, young people and pregnant women. Lack of resources and political will have hindered the RHD community from bringing together its expertise to find global solutions to tackle RHD at the local level.

But this is changing. Since the dawn of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 and the simultaneous formation of the RHD Action movement, the RHD community has continued to work hard to pool knowledge and resources.

Tools such as the online RHD Atlas are now mapping RHD programmes from around the world (including those featured as case studies in this report). The RHD Resource Hub is now providing the world’s first ‘one-stop-shop’ repository of multilingual RHD materials, which can be accessed freely online.

This Status Report builds on existing progress by giving global insights on the people, policies and programmes that work together to end RHD:

• By exploring the PEOPLE living with RHD, and those who support them, RHD is lifted out of the abstract and grounded in real-life experience.
• By understanding the complex POLICY environment, we can identify opportunities to push RHD forward on national, regional and global agendas.
• By comparing and contrasting RHD PROGRAMMES from around the world, we get a clear picture of what is working and how much progress is being made on the ground.

RHD prevention and control is improving day by day. The RHD Action movement exists to drive this momentum on behalf of the 32 million people currently living with RHD around the world.

We hope you enjoy this Status Report – thank you for supporting our work.
www.rhdaction.org