According to media reports on November 16, a new drug for the treatment of sleeping sickness was approved by the European Pharmaceutical Agency for clinical use, which is the first full oral treatment drug for the disease transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies, and the clinical description of the drug is that humans have only found an effective drug after hundreds of years of nausea abuse.
The average person may not know much about sleeping sickness, a disease endemic to Africa and very mysterious and fearful, but Africans, especially the African aborigines living in the Lake District, are afraid and fearful. There have been three major outbreaks in recent history: one between 1896 and 1906, mainly in Uganda and the Congo Basin, and the second in several African Lakes countries along the Great Rift Valley in 1920 and 1970. The most recent outbreak occurred in 1990, and at the time of the outbreak, 34,000 people were still killed.
In 1896, an outbreak of sleeping sickness in South Africa led to a large number of deaths of humans and animals
The scientific name of the disease is African trypanosomiasis, commonly known as sleeping sickness, which is usually fatal when left untreated. It is transmitted through the bite of the tsetse fly, causing neuropsychiatric symptoms such as aggression, psychosis, and destructive destruction of sleep patterns, hence the name sleeping sickness.
This is the host of the legendary horror tycoon's fly sleeping sickness called the tsetse fly or the green fly
When humans and animals are bitten by a tsetse fly for 1 to 3 weeks, the initial symptoms include fever, headache, itching, and joint pain. After weeks to months, symptoms of the second stage of exacerbation begin to appear, and the patient develops mental confusion, poor coordination, numbness, and sleep disturbances. Finally, it is sleepless and emaciated until death.
Not only was the tsetse fly widely prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, becoming a killer of indigenous Africans, but also posed a serious threat to Arabs and whites who entered the African trade, expeditions, and slave trade and colonization early on, and died of the disease. Later, the most effective way for the white colonial government was to relocate the entire tribe living near the lake area to the hills far away from the lake area, which is what people who have been to Africa have found, and the general large cities in Africa are built on cool highlands, such as Nairobi, which was originally to prevent the nuisance of tsetse flies, because although the small flies are crazy, they cannot breed without the swamps by the lake.
Sleeping sickness virus under the microscope
Traditional treatment usually requires a lumbar puncture to detect parasites in a blood smear or lymph node fluid. This treatment, which involves patients receiving painful injections and prolonged hospitalizations, is nearly impossible for poor African regions, where they will undoubtedly die if they are bitten by this fly.
Unlike current treatments for this disease, which will only take 10 days orally, Fexinidazole, although just a simple pill, can be taken at any stage of the outbreak of the sleeping sickness virus, which is a huge leap forward in the human response to the disease. It's just that this leap is a bit late, and in the 100 years that has been documented, far more than a million people have died of sleeping sickness in Africa.