As the place of origin of mankind, Africa's rich natural resources and mineral resources are incomparable to other regions, but its backward productivity and relatively primitive living conditions have always given the world an impression of "poverty", why do the locals keep the "golden mountains and silver mountains" and do not get rid of poverty?
In some documentaries, we always see a lot of Africans just sitting there to pass the time, not farming and not doing livestock, this "loose" attitude, let us feel that their poverty is completely self-inflicted, but with the study of an animal, we may understand that poverty is a vicious circle, and the starting point of this cycle is the tsetse fly known as the African "curse".
As early as the 15th century, European immigrants landed on the African continent, they have a desire to explore Africa with extremely rich products, but at that time they also saw the living conditions of the African locals, and there were not many animals everywhere that were domesticated, not even horses for hurrying, so they imported a group of horses and livestock from their european hometowns, and took the opportunity to teach Africans how to domesticate animals and develop agriculture, but the good times were not long, and the first step of European conquest of Africa was a problem. These European horses not only could not adapt to the African climate, all kinds of mosquitoes also afflicted them, the horse mortality rate was extremely high, and these horses had similar symptoms before they died, that is, "coma", which also afflicted the European colonists who came to Africa.
In 1894, when david bruce, a surgeon in the British army, was studying animals to die of coma, a blood-sucking fly called tsetse flies circled the cow for a few days, the cow fell ill, David isolated a microorganism in the cow's body, and then David put the tsetse fly where the dog lived, the dog soon fell ill, the body also found this microorganism, and then experimented on the horse, the results were the same, so David determined the connection between the tsetse fly, the microorganism and livestock disease.
In 1903, Uganda under british colonization suffered from "sleeping sickness", scientists at that time believed that this was caused by a bacterial infection, and proposed a variety of treatment options without effect, so David, who had some success in studying animal sleeping disease, was invited to diagnose it, and David quickly isolated the same microorganisms as the sick animals in the patient's body, because this microorganism looked like an awl, so it was officially named - trypanosomiasis, and its transmission carrier was the blood-sucking tsetse fly.
Tsetse flies are only in sub-Saharan Africa to survive insects, scientific name tsetse flies, there are about 30 species, its size and the general fly is similar, between 6-13 mm, the body color is yellow, brown and even black, to humans, livestock and other vertebrate blood for food, in the human gathering area distribution is particularly large, blood sucking for tsetse flies, not only about hunger but also affect the breeding of offspring.
Female tsetse flies in the womb will only have one larva to develop, after the eggs hatch in the womb, the larvae will obtain nutrition through a pair of mammary glands on the uterine wall, during this period if the female flies do not suck enough blood, the larvae in the stomach will not develop completely, if all goes well, the female flies will give birth to a mature larva every 10 days, the larvae will burrow into the soil after birth, 1 hour can pupate, pupate after a few weeks, it has to be said that the reproductive process of the tsetse flies is somewhat similar to mammals, and there is no way to win by quantity, It is to strive for excellence and raise every offspring.
Of course, this is from the perspective of tsetse flies, but for animals such as humans and domestic animals, the existence of tsetse flies is simply a "curse", and like all blood-sucking animals, the tsetse fly carrier trypanosomiasis, after biting the prey, the trypanosomiasis larvae on the tsetse fly mouthpiece will take the opportunity to enter the bloodstream, so that agricultural animals and humans are infected with "sleeping sickness".
Agricultural livestock is the basis for the development of agriculture and transportation, whether it is planting or animal husbandry, are inseparable from the figure of agricultural livestock, but because of the rampant tsetse flies, agricultural livestock introduced from outside Africa will become a huge "blood bank" of tsetse flies, the lack of resistance to trypanosomiasis in the body, there will soon be a large number of deaths, which is the reason why it is difficult to see livestock such as cattle, horses and sheep in Africa, agriculture that relies only on manpower development will not have much improvement, and the scale of the formation is doomed to most African tribes still choose to hunt for a living , rely on the sky to eat.
At the beginning of the colonization of Africa, tsetse flies and the carrying trypanosomiasis caused widespread sleeping sickness, and between 1896 and 1906 alone, 250,000 people died of sleeping sickness in the British colonized Uganda, and the number in the Congo Basin directly surged to 500,000.
The huge scope of infection attracted great attention, and scientists continued to study tsetse flies and trypanosomiasis, as well as related protective measures, and after 1970, sleeping sickness was very effectively controlled, but the good times did not last long, with the unstable situation in parts of Africa, the number of poor people increased, and the tsetse flies began to spread the parasite among these war-torn and impoverished people.
To this day, tsetse flies still affect the safety of 60 million people in Africa, about 500,000 people are infected with trypanosomiasis every year, and more than 60,000 people die due to untimely treatment or poverty, while also causing 3 million cattle deaths every year, economic losses of up to 4 billion US dollars, however, the poorer the area, the more relaxed the protection of tsetse flies, and the invasion of tsetse flies will exacerbate poverty and form a dead cycle.
The spread of tsetse flies, since the 14th century there are relevant records, the king of Mali in Africa Mari Jata is dead from tsetse fly-borne sleeping sickness, to this day this ancient disease is still not solved, in our view simple treatment and medicine, for living in remote areas they may be difficult to access, maybe the Internet is right, there is only one disease in the world...