Deep Sleep

Did you know that there are 20,000 cases a year of African Trypanosomiasis (African Sleeping Sickness) worldwide? Only 21 cases of African Sleeping Sickness have been reported in the United States, the earliest in 1967. The last case of African Sleeping Sickness was in 1981 in the United States when an Edinburgh, Texas, male, 72, went on a hunting trip in northwest Tanzania. Sixteen days after being bitten by tsetse flies, he became extremely sick.

African Sleeping Sickness is carried by infected tsetse flies mostly found in the woodland and savannah areas of Uganda, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Zaire, and Malawi. Major flare-up areas are in Angola, the Central American Republic, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Sudan.

African Sleeping Sickness has been around since 1850. The spread of the disease is difficult to track down. More than 60 million men, women, and children are at risk in 36 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Persons at risk of contracting the sickness are tourists, game wardens, and hunters. When touring these areas, tourists are advised to wear thick clothing because tsetse flies can easily bite through thinner fabrics; and also remember that tsetse flies are attracted to dark and bright colors--khaki or olive-colored clothing will do the trick.

Sir David Bruce, British physician and pathologist, is credited with discovering the causes and modes of certain tropical diseases. According to Encarta researchers, in 1895, while studying nagana, a cattle disease in South Africa, he found a trypanosome (microbe) that causes this disease and suggested that the same microbe caused the disease of sleeping sickness in humans. Through further investigation, he found that the disease can be carried from animals to humans and from person to person by the tsetse fly. Visible signs of symptoms usually occur 1-4 weeks after infection. Symptoms include fever, severe headache, irritability, extreme fatigue, swollen lymph nodes, and achy muscles and joints. More serious symptoms involve the central nervous system that can cause confusion, personality changes, slurred speech, seizures, and difficulty walking and talking.

The true number of people infected with African Sleeping Sickness in unknown, but it estimated that 300,000 to 500,000 people may have the disease.

According to the researchers of the Program Against African Trypanosomiasis (PAAT), one-third of the continent’s agriculture and rural development has slowed down due to the disease. Food production has reduced 50 percent and there have been 3 million livestock deaths each year. PAAT is an “international alliance that treats the tsetse/trypanosomiasis problem as an integral part of development and poverty alleviation, assuring positive, and lasting results in tryps-affected areas”.

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