The Origins of Sleeping Sickness Epidemics
The Centre for Molecular Epidemiology and Ecology.
Dr Geoff Hide is a Reader in Biological Sciences in the Centre for Molecular Epidemiology and Ecology at the University of Salford.
What is sleeping sickness
Sleeping sickness is a devastating disease in Africa that kills many thousands of people a year. It is transmitted by the tsetse fly and is caused by a single celled blood parasite called the trypanosome.
The disease is almost always fatal unless treated ?? but the drugs used to cure the disease are extremely dangerous and side effects from the drugs can kill 10% of patients treated.
Where can it be found?
The disease is found, predominantly, in areas of Africa that suffer from poverty, social unrest and other diseases (eg. HIV, malaria), and consequently there is a scarcity of resources available to combat the disease.
Sleeping sickness is generally found in quite specific places, known as foci. The disease is often present at very low levels (or even absent) in these foci for many years. From time to time, however, the disease flares up to epidemic proportions.
What are we doing at Salford?
At the University of Salford, we are developing molecular diagnostic tools, rather like those used in DNA fingerprinting for forensic analysis, which can be used to track the spread of the parasites.
Alongside colleagues at Edinburgh University, we have shown that the movement of cattle from one region to another may be important in the bringing in strains of human infective trypanosomes into a focus thereby causing an epidemic.
This offers potential methods of controlling disease by regulating and monitoring the movement of cattle.
Submitted by: Dr Geoff Hide, the University of Salford, 14 February 2003
