Sleeping hearts: 12 years after a follow up study on cardiac findings due to sleeping sickness

How to shorten patient follow-up after treatment for Trypanosoma brucei gambiense sleeping sickness.

BACKGROUND. Clinical management of human African trypanosomiasis requires patient follow-up of 2 years' duration. At each follow-up visit, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is examined for trypanosomes and white blood cells (WBCs). Shortening follow-up would improve patient comfort and facilitate control of human African trypanosomiasis. METHODS. A prospective study of 360 patients was performed in the...

Sleeping Sickness Wakes Again

Sleeping sickness of horses was, as reeentiy as the IQSO's, the most devastating livestock disease in the United States. Horses died by the hundreds of thousands in the Midwestern United States, in California, and along the Atlantic seaboard at a period which coincided with the beginning of the sharp decline in the use of horses on the farm. Losses were so severe in some areas that the inevitab...

Combination therapy for sleeping sickness: a wake-up call.

Ours is a smaller world than that of previous generations. Given humankind's insatiable desire to change places for all kinds of reasons and through all kinds of routes, clinicians in developed countries are increasingly exposed to diseases that used to be considered " exotic. " Cases of African trypanosomiasis, the archetype of such diseases ever since Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, are no...

Cell Cycle Inhibition To Treat Sleeping Sickness

African trypanosomiasis is caused by infection with the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma brucei During infection, this pathogen divides rapidly to high density in the bloodstream of its mammalian host in a manner similar to that of leukemia. Like all eukaryotes, T. brucei has a cell cycle involving the de novo synthesis of DNA regulated by ribonucleotide reductase (RNR), which catalyzes the conve...

Sleeping sickness – human African trypanosomiasis