Uganda launches campaign to fight sleeping sickness

Ugandan health and agricultural departments have launched The Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness campaign to fight the infectious disease in the east African country.

Under the campaign, about 86 percent of the cattle population in Uganda would be treated with trypanocidal drugs free of charge to eliminate the human-infective parasites, for cattle are the major reservoir of the parasites.

"We have a threat at hand. Acute sleeping sickness is a serious disease and the merger of the two (with chronic sleeping sickness) will complicate everything," Bright Rwamirama, the state minister for animal industry, was quoted by Daily Monitor on Saturday as saying.

In the entire Sub-Saharan Africa, Human African Trypanosomiasis takes two forms of Acute and Chronic depending on the parasite involved and Uganda is the only country where the two forms of sleeping sickness exist.

Originally, only the chronic form called Gambiense which presents more than 90 percent of reported cases occurred in north- western Uganda. But of recent, the acute form, Trypanosoma brucei, which had confined to south-east, has spread to the north.

Once the acute form of sleeping sickness merges with the chronic form that has existed for years in the north, the diagnosis and treatment of the disease in humans would be severely compromised.

"Since 1980s, acute sleeping sickness has been spreading in north but we are now experiencing a threatening situation that the two forms may merge," said Lawrence Ssemakula, the Executive Director of the Coordinating Office for Control of Trypanosomiasis in Uganda.

"The overlap of the two diseases will complicate the already difficult task of treating sleeping sickness," added Ssemakula.

The northward spread of the disease has been attributed to the movement of cattle with human-infective parasites from the southeast to northwest.

It is believed that most cattle from endemic areas carry the human-infective parasites and that a human being is a thousand times more likely to acquire sleeping sickness via the bite of a tsetse fly and a cow more than from another infected person.

Recent research findings have led to the development of a new approach for the prevention of acute sleeping sickness by treating cattle to prevent the disease in people living in affected districts.

Source: Xinhua