[ 2012-06-10 ]

African sleeping sickness shrouded in superstition
KOBITOI, Chad (AFP) - A frail 65-year-old woman
sitting under the mango trees in a rural village
in Chad suffers from a tropical disease that eats
into the brain, and the locals blame on
witchcraft.

"I've been suffering for more than two months now.
I have headaches, fever, and I just feel very
tired," said Lea Sadene, who has just been tested
and diagnosed.

She has Human African trypanosomiasis, commonly
known as sleeping sickness, which is transmitted
by tsetse flies found in 36 sub-Saharan African
countries.

Sadene is in the first phase of the often fatal
illness. Without treatment in four months to a
year, "the parasite penetrates into the brain,
causing serious neurological symptoms, until
death," said Doctor Benedict Blaynay, head of
neglected tropical diseases at French
pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.

"The symptoms can cause a change in personality,
mental deterioration, leading to a long sleep or
coma," which gives the illness its name, he said.

Chadian health officials say around 3,300 people
were infected between 2001 and 2011 in several
areas of the landlocked central African nation,
one of the poorest in the world.

"With more than 100 cases per year Chad is
considered an endemic country," said Doctor Peka
Mallaye, who is in charge of the national
programme to fight against sleeping sickness.

In Kobitoi in southern Chad recently, village
women lined up with their children, many with
swollen bellies, in the scorching sun as
temperatures hit 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees
Fahrenheit) to undergo tests for the disease
organised with Sanofi.

The team found 14 cases of sleeping sickness out
of 120 people examined, Mallaye said.

"This village is located next to a forest where
the tsetse flies live. During the rainy season,
people pass through the forest to go fishing or
hunting," he said.

Fighting the disease, however, takes more than
testing and drugs. For the people living in Chad's
rural communities, the strange symptoms of
sleeping sickness have long been shrouded in
superstition about witchcraft and demonic
possession.

"Before we didn't know that it was the disease
that was killing people. People died like flies,
they blamed witches," said Alngar Legode, a
village mother trying to comfort her eight-month
child still crying after being pricked for the
blood test for the disease.

"Witchcraft is seen as a real phenomenon in
traditional societies," said sociologist Serferbe
Charlot. "They think that a man or a woman
suspected of witchcraft is eating away at a
person's soul."

In the advanced stages of the disease the infected
person experiences severe neurological problems.

"When this disease reaches the brain, the patient
loses control of his life, he even becomes
violent. That is when the villagers believe that
the sick person is possessed by evil spirits,"
said Charlot.

"It is up to the health specialists to prove" to
the population that it is not witchcraft, he said,
adding: "The fight against sleeping sickness calls
for raising awareness."

But the World Health Organisation says it is not a
losing battle.

After continued control efforts, the most recent
statistics available show the number of cases in
2009 dropped below 10,000 for the first time in 50
years, and the trend continued in 2010 with 7139
new cases reported, the WHO reported on its
website.

WHO estimates the number of actual cases is
currently 30,000. The most affected country has
been the Democratic Republic of Congo, which
declared 500 new cases in 2010.

The WHO has established public-private
partnerships with Sanofi and also Bayer Healthcare
to create a surveillance team and provide support
to endemic countries in their control efforts as
well as a free supply of drugs to treat the sick.

Diagnosis should be made as early as possible
before the disease reaches the neurological stage,
which calls for more complicated and risky
treatment.

The chief executive of Sanofi, Christopher
Viehbacher, said the main challenge ahead "is to
keep up the expertise in diagnosis and treatment
in the medical centres, so that the monitoring for
sleeping sickness is maintained."

Sleeping sickness figures on the WHO's list of 10
neglected tropical diseases. In January in London,
the UN health agency brought together the US,
British and United Arab Emirates governments along
with 13 pharmaceutical companies and international
organisations like the World Bank and the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation to make a new push to
eliminate these diseases by the end of the
decade.

"If we keep doing the right things better, and on
a larger scale, some of these diseases could be
eliminated by 2015, and others by 2020," WHO
Director General Margaret Chan has said.

Source - AFP

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