Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
A blood smear from a patient with sleeping sickness.
Posted on 01/09/2008 10:48:20 PM PST by neverdem
Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated $19 million to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative to further one of its goals: finding a new drug for African sleeping sickness.
Not that $19 million will come close to doing that. Even if a miracle cure is found, it will take lab work and clinical trials that could easily cost $100 million to prove it is really a miracle and not the Vioxx of the African savannah.
But the gift spotlights just how tricky the search for new treatments can be when the disease is fearsome but nearly forgotten because its victims are poor and obscure.
The plan for sleeping sickness is a series of incremental steps, said Dr. Bernard Pécoul, a former member of Doctors Without Borders who founded the partnership in 2003.
A drug started from scratch might not be ready till 2020 or later. A perfect one, he said, would be taken orally, would cure the disease in less than a week and would have no horrible side effects. But until then, even slight advances in treatment will benefit victims, who now face choices familiar to cancer patients: the cure is so rough that the only thing worse is no cure.
“Sleeping sickness” is too benign a nickname for human African trypanosomiasis, which is caused by a protozoan spread by biting tsetse flies. When the parasites enter the brain, victims hallucinate wildly. They have been known to chase neighbors with machetes, throw themselves into latrines and scream with pain at the touch of water. Only at the end do they lapse into a lassitude so great that they cannot eat, followed by coma and death.
About 150,000 people contract the disease each year, but 50 million people in 36 countries live in areas where they are...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Would DDT solve this problem?
Sounds like a victory party over at DU.
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