X-Nico

3 unusual facts about sleeping sickness


Sleeping sickness

Encephalitis lethargica, a form of encephalitis that swept the world in the 1920s

Animal trypanosomiasis, also known as nagana or animal African trypanosomiasis

Eastern equine encephalitis virus, a zoonotic alphavirus and arbovirus present in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean


Alan Fairlamb

Professor Alan Fairlamb, and his team study the protozoan parasites causing three different diseases - sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and leishmaniasis.

Elodie Ghedin

Her work focuses on the molecular biology of the parasites that cause diseases such as leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, elephantiasis, and river blindness.

Félix Mesnil

Member of the French Commission on sleeping sickness, he worked for the organisation of the mission in French Equatorial Africa.

John Lancelot Todd

In 1903 Todd and Dutton accepted an invitation by King Leopold II of Belgium to research the connection between trypanosoma and sleeping sickness in the Congo Free State.

Kids for World Health

Kids for World Health was founded in 2001 at Chatsworth Avenue School, in Larchmont, New York by a then 3rd grade class who were motivated after watching a CBS film from "60 Minutes" on the Southern Sudan Sleeping Sickness Program in 1994.

Max W. Kimmich

He specialized in anti-British propaganda films, e.g. My Life for Ireland in 1940/1941, and Germanin from 1942, which portrays scientists developing a medicine against sleeping sickness.

Sleep disorder

Sleeping sickness - a parasitic disease which can be transmitted by the Tsetse fly.


see also

African trypanosomiasis

Two independent variants of the APOL1 gene found in African haplotypes carrying signatures of natural selection have been shown to confer protection against the acute version of sleeping sickness caused by T. b. rhodesiense, while at the same time increasing risk of kidney disease when inherited from both parents.

Cognized environment

Rappaport was an ecological anthropologist, like Andrew P. Vayda, and wished to contrast the actual reality and adaptations (the operational environment) within a people's ecological niche – say, the existence of tsetse flies and their role in causing sleeping sickness among humans – with how the people’s culture understands nature (the cognized environment) – say, the belief that witches live in those areas that science knows is the habitat of the tsetse.

Félix Mesnil

In 1903, together with Alphonse Laveran (1845–1922), he showed that the parasite responsible for the visceral leishmaniasis (or Kala-azar, a fever in India), first described by William Boog Leishman (1865–1926), is a new protozoa, different from Trypanosoma, the agent of the sleeping sickness, and from Plasmodium, the agent of paludism (malaria).

Glycoprotein

Variable surface glycoproteins allow the sleeping sickness Trypanosoma parasite to escape the immune response of the host.

The Sleeping Sickness

The Sleeping Sickness is an album by SubArachnoid Space and Walking Timebombs, released on December 7, 1999 through Elsie & Jack Recordings.