Chad is one of the world’s poorest and most backward nations, known as the “dead heart of Africa.” It has been “swamped by civil wars” for much of its existence. People there die more than twenty years earlier than in America, from things like diarrheal diseases. It has a hereditary dictator who rigs elections to stay in power and had an opposition leader killed.
Yet Chad has managed to eliminate the horrific disease of sleeping sickness:
It marks the first neglected tropical disease to be eliminated in the country. Chad is the first country to be acknowledged for eliminating a neglected tropical disease in 2024, becoming the 51st country to have achieved such target globally…one of the four global overarching targets set by the Road map for neglected tropical diseases…
Sleeping sickness can cause flu-like symptoms initially but eventually causing behaviour change, confusion, sleep cycle disturbances or even coma, often leading to death….So far, seven countries have been validated by WHO for eliminating the gambiense form of [sleeping sickness]: Togo (2020), Benin (2021), Côte d’Ivoire (2021), Uganda (2022), Equatorial Guinea (2022), Ghana (2023), and Chad (2024). The rhodesiense form of the disease has been eliminated as a public health problem in one country, Rwanda, as validated by WHO in 2022….
As of June 2024, across the WHO African region, 20 countries have eliminated at least one neglected tropical disease, with Togo having eliminated 4 diseases and Benin and Ghana having eliminated 3 diseases each.
Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), also known as sleeping sickness, is a vector-borne parasitic disease caused by the Trypanosoma parasite. These parasites are passed to humans through the bite of infected tsetse flies, which get the infection from humans or animals carrying the parasites. There are 2 forms of the disease: one caused by Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, found in 24 countries in West and Central Africa, accounting for more than 92% of cases. The gambiense form is the only form of human African trypanosomiasis transmitted in Chad. There is another form of HAT caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, found in 13 countries in East and Southern Africa accounting for the remaining cases.
Sleeping sickness is an awful disease that begins with fever and aches. Then things get worse. The parasite that causes the disease will disrupt sleeping patterns and cause aggressiveness and psychosis. The death rate from sleeping sickness is close to 100%, if it is untreated.
The customary treatment for sleeping sickness was also quite awful: a drug that is toxic to the kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that’s toxic to the brain. The treatment kills up to a tenth of all patients. But thanks to a recent discovery, people can take the drug fexinidazole to treat the disease instead.
For many years, therapy would begin with a lumbar puncture to see if the parasite has invaded the central nervous system, followed by injections of a drug that damages your kidneys, followed by an arsenic-based drug that harms your brain.
But scientists have discovered that fexinadazole can be used to treat sleeping sickness, first the chronic variety, and more recently for acute sleeping sickness as well. European regulators approved the drug based on results from a clinical trial showing that a 10-day course of pills cures acute sleeping sickness in 97% of patients. That will lead to approval of the drug by countries outside of the EU, many of which more or less automatically approve drugs approved by the European Medicines Agency.
