Scientists declare war on sleeping sickness

The 26th conference of the International Scientific Council for Trypanosomiasis Research and Control (ISCTRC), a body created to fight sleeping sickness, opened on Monday in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The five-day meeting, held under the auspices of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), is scheduled to end with the launch of a Pan-African tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis eradication campaign (PATTEC). According to figures from the Council, 60 million people in 37 African countries are at risk of being infected with the disease. The actual caseload, which had been decreasing, has started to increase and the official number of people infected, 300,000, has reached the peak registered in the 1930s. The worst affected countries include Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda. Sleeping sickness is a tropical disease caused by the trypanosomiasis parasite, which is transmitted by the tsetse fly. The parasite attacks the nervous system and the patient eventually lapses into a coma until death ensues. In the case of animals it affects growth, milk and meat production and their capacity to plough land. The disease limits livestock production and human health in an area of more than 10 million square kilometres, according to the OAU, of which the ISCTRC is an organ. "Tripanosomiasis remain one of the great obstacles to agricultural and rural development because the human and animal forms of the disease are often fatal and debilitating," said Burkina Faso's prime minister, Ernest Paramanga Yonly, who presided over the opening ceremony of the meeting. African presidents decided last year at an OAU summit in Lome, Togo, to come together to fight the disease, and they reiterated this decision at this year's summit in Lusaka, Zambia. "We could never have hoped for anything better than the heads of states and governments declaration of war against the tsetse fly," Dr John Musiime of the OAU said. "Insufficient food production is the cause of poverty and malnutrition in most African countries," Musiime said. "We believe that tsetse infestation is by far one of the main causes of this food insufficiency. This problem is compounded by high population growth, natural calamities and inappropriate agricultural policies."