How wearing shoes could eliminate one of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases

‘We didn’t realise going barefoot was a risk,’ Manjore Merkeneh, a farmer in Dawro, Ethiopia, with podoconiosis. Photograph: Fred Harter

For Damenech Dangaro, it started with itching and burning sensations along her toes when she was a child. Then her feet began to swell. Within weeks they had grown to three times their normal size, and soon hard nodules of skin appeared on her toes.

The bouts of headache and fever that followed left Dangaro mostly bedridden for several years. When she ventured out, so severe was the pain in her disfigured legs that she had to half-crawl around her hilly village in south-west Ethiopia.