By: Alanna Shaikh

When I was a kid, I thought sleeping sickness sounded like a nice thing to get. Compared to chicken pox or Coxsackie virus, a disease that just made me nod off sounded pleasant. Kind of cozy in a way. Every time I got bored I could just take a little nap, and all the grown-ups would say “Don’t mind her, she has the sleeping sickness.” It would be like being a kitten or a puppy.

Long-time readers of this blog know just how wrong I was. Sleeping sickness is awful. It does not involve a lot of comfy naps. Sleeping sickness – trypanosomiasis – is a deadly parasitic disease transmitted by the tsetse fly.[i] It’s called the world’s deadliest disease.

One especially tricky thing about trypanosomiasis is that it’s very hard to diagnose. The symptoms are varied, and look a lot like the symptoms of everything else. Red sore from the fly bite, fever, headache, irritability. It sounds a lot like ordinary life until it worsens into an infection of the central nervous symptom and then kills you.

The disease actually has no specific clinical symptoms; you have to have a diagnostic test or you’re just guessing. Right now, health workers identify suspected cases of sleeping sickness by looking at symptoms; then they do a spine puncture to draw out fluid and look at it under a microscope to see if the trypanosomiasis parasite is present. It’s a lengthy process that depends on good clinical skills, functional microscopes, and staff with the ability to use them.

Prompt and accurate diagnosis is important to treating trypanosomiasis. The treatment is toxic, for one thing, so you need to be sure it really is sleeping sickness before you treat someone. You can’t treat on a guess. The treatment is also not very effective, so your likelihood of a cure really improves if you fight the infection early. Continue reading →