“Last week, the World Health Organization reported that two African countries have defeated a parasite: In Guinea, public health authorities stamped out sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease carried by the tsetse fly. Sleeping sickness is easily treated early on, but if allowed to progress causes irreversible brain damage and, ultimately, death. Niger, meanwhile, became the first African country to eliminate river blindness, which, as its name suggests, can make you blind and is spread by flies that breed near rivers. The parasites in this case are long thin worms that burrow around in the sufferer’s skin,” reports The Doomslayer.
River blindness is “a parasitic disease caused by the Onchocerca volvulus worm, transmitted through the bites of infected black flies.” Niger “has been significantly impacted by this disease, affecting communities primarily along riverbanks of fast-flowing rivers where these flies breed, hence the disease is also known as river blindness…When [it] was widespread in West Africa, communities near rivers experienced higher rates of infection. Consequently, millions of people left these regions, often giving up farming on family land. Those who remained suffered severe symptoms such as blindness or incessant itching, which greatly limited their productivity.” Those who left to escape river blindness ended up farming less well-watered, less productive land, resulting in many experiencing malnutrition or deeper poverty.
Niger is a dusty, semi-arid country where most farmland can only grow drought-resistant crops like pearl millet and sorghum. If more people could live along rivers, they could grow more valuable, nutritious crops that have more vitamins than millet and sorghum.
Sleeping sickness is an awful disease that begins with fever, aches, and joint pain. Then things get worse. The parasite that causes the disease will disrupt sleeping patterns and cause aggressiveness, psychosis, and bizarre behavior. 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. A year ago, 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.
Guinea is not the only country to recently get rid of sleeping sickness. Earlier, Chad, an even poorer and less developed nation, managed to do so. Chad is one of the world’s poorest countries, 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 last year, Chad managed to eliminate the horrific disease of sleeping sickness.
