A deadly illness spread by the blood-sucking tsetse fly could be eliminated as a public health threat with the advent of a single dose that cures patients.
Without treatment, sleeping sickness — or human African trypanosomiasis — kills almost everyone infected. Patients suffer seizures, disrupted sleep cycles, mental deterioration and eventually coma.
Once treated with an arsenic-based drug so painful it was described as “fire in the veins,” advances in science have since reduced new cases to less than 600 in 2024, from a peak of 40,000 reported in 1998 with a further estimated 300,000 undiagnosed, Drugs for Neglected Diseases ...