The patient arrived at the hospital one hot night in Masi-Manimba, an agricultural town unfurled along the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Lukula River.
He was also unusually drowsy — a telltale sign of his illness. The patient, a 27-year-old man, had been brought in by a medical team screening villagers for sleeping sickness, a deadly parasitic disease spread via the bite of a blood-feeding fly.
Since the first case report in the late 14th century, the illness has ebbed and flowed in sub-Saharan Africa. Across the continent, the predominant form of sleeping sickness shows up in about two dozen countries, most cases now occurring in the DRC. The disease is a nightmarish scourge that can maim the brain and ultimately kill. But today, cases hover near an all-time low. In 2021, the World Health Organization reported just 747 cases of the predominant form, down from more than 37,000 in 1998.
That precipitous plunge came out of decades of work, millions of screenings, spinal taps upon spinal taps, toxic treatments and the rapid rise of safer though often burdensome ones, countless IV infusions, long hospital days and nights, medicine lugged to remote villages, and communities on constant alert for sleeping sickness’s insidious symptoms.
2023-03-21 07:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org