Global Health Academy

Preventing human sleeping sickness

Through the "Stamp out Sleeping Sickness (SoS)" project University of Edinburgh Researchers have been studying the disease and helping develop effective approaches to elimination and prevention.

farmer and beast subsite home

Sleeping sickness continues to blight rural tsetse infested Uganda, the disease is often miss-diagnosed in the communities which it affects.

Unfortunately for these communities the very animals which underpin their livelihoods, cattle, silently harbour the infectious agent, not showing signs of disease themselves.

By removing the infection from cattle and turning them into deadly targets for tsetse flies, sleeping sickness is gradually being pushed out of communities.

These approaches developed by the University of Edinburgh Researchers to eliminate the disease-causing parasites from cattle, has achieved a 75% reduction in total trypanosome prevalence which has translated into a reported reduction of 90% in human cases.

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Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness