OAU to help wipe out sleeping sickness

The scourge of tsetse flies, which kill 35,000 Africans each year by spreading sleeping sickness, could be wiped out within a decade, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) said on Tuesday. OAU Assistant Secretary-General Ambassador Lawrence Agubuzu pledged that the organisation would be at the forefront of the fight against the sleeping sickness disease, known as trypanosomiasis. Doctors estimate that 100 people a day die from the disease. "Our job is to lay solid foundations," Agubuzu said at the launch of the OAU's campaign against the disease. "We are not saying it will be defeated today or tomorrow... But we envisage that if all hands are on deck and the fight is consistent and continuous, maybe in seven years we will be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel." Agubuzu said the battle to rid the continent of the tsetse fly had the backing of every African country. Around 60 million people are at risk in 36 sub-Saharan countries. The number of people affected by the disease is now reaching record levels, and exceeding the severe epidemic faced by the continent in the 1930s. "We are now coming together as one family, knowing that this fly has no boundary," he said, adding that the campaign had the financial backing of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), based in Europe. Tsetse flies spread a parasite which gets into the blood of humans and animals and causes trypanosomiasis. It is prevalent in tropical countries and is believed to affect an area of 10 million square kilometres in Africa. The disease could be curbed by exposing laboratory-grown tsetse flies to gamma rays, which make them sterile. The flies are then released into the wild. Experts believe that 50,000 sterile tsetse flies released each week could eradicate the disease in an area of up to 10,000 square kilometres. "Females in the wild that mate with sterilised males do not produce viable offspring," said Dr John Kabayo, who heads the campaign, known as the Pan African Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Eradication Campaign (PATTEC). "So if you continue to release male flies in the field you will get to the stage where many of the flies will have mated with sterile flies." "From this we can get rid of them once and for all," Kabayo added. "The impact on people is severe. We lose about 100 people a day. On the animal side, we lose about three million livestock a year." The tsetse fly is a major block to sustainable development within Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, people get less than a third as many calories and half as much protein from infected animals. The main affected countries are Angola, Cameroon, Sudan, Uganda and the Central African Republic. In Zanzibar, a pilot project was launched which wiped out the single species of tsetse fly infesting the island. Agubuzu said that although Africa faced more devastating diseases like HIV/AIDS, it was important to tackle them all. "There are competing problems, but what we are doing is to establish mechanisms for dealing with each and every problem," he said.