SLEEPING SICKNESS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 56, 7 March 1923, Page 10

SLEEPING SICKNESS

CURE FOUND IN NEW DRUG

DISCOVERED BY GERMAN

CHEMISTS.

German chemists are trying to win back the colonies that the German Kaiser lost. They are offering to trade a now coal tar drug for the African territory which Germany held before 1914, but which fell to-the victors of the Great War. Tliis territory amounts to a million square miles, or one-third the area of the United States,' states Dr. Edwin E. Slosson in the "New York Evening Post," and has been divided up by mutual agreement between Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal. It comprises some of the richest and most fertile land on the globe, but it rests under a curse—the sleeping sickness. This mysterious malady, which has laid waste a large part of the Dark Continent, is now known to be due to a minute parasite that lives in tha blood of man and boast and is called a, trypanosome. When you look at cno through a microscope you would not think that bo little a creature could have so long a name or do so much harm. He looks like a, smashed mosquito wiggler or a stickless kite. It propels itself along by sculling with its whip-like tail. Tho tsetse fly gets its Jiving from the blood of wild animals, cattle, and human beings, and in so doing peddles about the microbe from sick to well. Tho infected individual suffers at first from fever, but gradually sinks into on insensibility from which the sleeper rarely wakes. This sort of sleeping sickness is peculiar to Africa and has nothing in common with the disease that has recently appeared in America, except in the name and the somnolent sjinptom*. In the latter part of the last century when Europeans invaded the interior of Africa they found this micro-organism the most dangerous of the wild animals to be combated. Lions and elephants could be killed, but the tsetse "fly was too small to be shot and the trypanosome was too small to be seen. How to destroy the parasite without harming the host was the question.

The first sign of a solution of the problem came in 1904, when the German physician Ehrlich and his Japanese assistant, Shiga, discovered an aniline dye which, injected into the blood of a person seized with sleeping sickness, would kill the parasite. This dye was named "trypan re<3." Two years Inter Mesnil and Nicolie, of the Pasteur Institute, of Paris, found that several similar dyes made by the Bayer Dye Works were also serviceable. These dye-drugs were all derivatives of napthalene, familiar to us all sine© little white balls of it drop from our clothes when we shake them out in the autumn.

But none of the known dyes was sufficiently active so that they were certain to clean out the pests from the body of the patient. The Bayer company has quietly continued its search for something more powerful and equally inocuous and has at last, after' 204 compounds had been made and found unsatisfactory, got one that cures. It is not a dye but a white powder, soluble in water. It was tried successfully on mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits,., dogs, horses, and finally upon man. An English patent who had suffered from sleeping sickness for a year, and on whom all the customary remedies had been tried in vain, was cured by four doses amounting altogether to an eighth of an ounce. Better still, it was found that a single dose would make a person immune to the disease for a long period, even if infected by the fly. It is also said that the new msdiciho or some of its relatives will cure malaria and other tropical fevers. Whether "Bayer 205" is a plain naphthalene derivative, like the earlier efforts of the firm, is not known to the outside world for the composition is kept secret. Small samples of the drug havo been furnished for experimentation to Belgian, British, and American physicians, but under pledge of professional sscrecy. At a recent meeting in Hamburg of the German Association of Tropical Medicine one of the speaker!) said: "Bayer 205 is the key to tropical Africa, and. consequently the key to all the colonies. The German Government must, therefore, be required to safeguard this discovery for Germany. Its value is such that any privilege of a share in it granted to other nations must be made conditional upon the restoration to Germany of her colonial empire." It is indeed the irony of fate that the Germans . should have found the means of making, their colonies colon? isable only after they had lost them, and that their discovery must go to benefit those who took their African territories from them. For this suggestion of buying back a million square miles for a single chemical symbol can hardly be taken seriously. The chemists of other countries are already hot on the trail -of the Germans, and, with what clues they have, will doubtless eventually find out the composition of the mysterious medicine

But whether Germany makes anything out of it or not, it may turn out that her scientists by this discovery will bring as much benefit to Africa as her soldiers did damage in Europe.