Continental campaign against sleeping sickness

Burkina Faso's prime minister, Ernest Paramanga Yonly, launched a campaign on Friday to eradicate the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness from Africa. The Pan African Tsetse Fly and Trypanosomiasis Eradication Campaign (PATTEC) was launched at a five-day meeting in Ouagadougou, attended by some 300 scientists from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.

The meeting was held under the auspices of the International Scientific Council for Trypanosomiasis Research and Control (ISCTRC), an organ of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

PATTEC's mission is to rid Africa of the tsetse fly and Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) in the next five years by coordinating and harmonising activities and raising funds.

The campaign was initiated at an OUA summit in Togo in 1999 and reiterated last year at a summit of African leaders in Zambia. To guarantee the success of eradication efforts, it is going to make sure that joint action against the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness is undertaken simultaneously by neighbouring countries.

"Each country believed it could control tsetse eradication alone within its own borders," said Burkina Faso's minister of animal resources, Alphonse Bonou. "It is important that everyone has understood that only an integrated regional campaign can lead to the eradication of the tsetse fly."

Two pharmaceutical companies, Bayer and Aventis, have agreed to provide WHO with free medicines against sleeping sickness for five years.

Tsetse infests 10,000,000 sq.km

The tsetse fly infests an area of 10 million sq. km, stretching from Senegal to South Africa. It transmits the trypanosomiasis parasite that attacks the human nervous system, causing the victim to go into a prolonged coma until
he or she dies.

According to WHO, 60 million people are at risk in 37 countries while 300,000 are already infected. It says 25,000 people die every year and the situation is worsening because 40,000 persons are infected annually.

According to the ISCTRC, the infection rate has now reached the peak it had attained in the 1930's. The situation has been declared "very serious" in East and Central African countries, namely Uganda, Sudan, the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Angola, while the disease has re-emerged in Benin, Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Gabon and Togo.

In Gabon, where the prevalence is three percent, the infection rate has reached its highest level since 1960.

The tsetse fly hampers agricultural development by limiting farmers' health as well as meat and milk production.

"The strong incidence of trypanosomiasis highlights the failure of former methods and show the importance of the disease in the desperate combat against famine, poverty and the disease," according to the ISCTRC. "There is urgent need to elaborate efficient methods to fight trypanosomiasis."

Yonly described sleeping sickness as "one of the great obstacles to
agricultural and rural development because the human and animal forms of the disease are often fatal and debilitating."

Joint efforts, money needed

The failure to eradicate trypanosomiasis has been attributed to insufficient money and a lack of coordinated programmes. "Campaigns that are wide in scope and simultaneous are necessary because the insect does not know borders," ISCTRC Chairman Issa Sidibe said.

According to WHO, the technical means and medicines to lead a successful campaign against the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis in West and Central Africa are available today, including effective diagnostic methods that will enable treatment and examinations in villages, but money is an issue.

"Very few donor countries are willing to finance the all-out campaign," said WHO regional adviser on trypanosomiasis control Simon Van Nieuwenhove.
So far only France and Belgium have agreed to help fund it.

[ENDS]