SCIENTISTS WINNING BATTLE AGAINST DEADLY TSETSE FLY

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 June 1948, Page 5

SCIENTISTS WINNING BATTLE AGAINST DEADLY TSETSE FLY

WASHINGTON, June 2. Scientists finally are winning their battle against a fly that has kept man from farming millions of some of the world’s most fertile acres. The fly is thp Dr P. A. Buxton, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the regions the tsetse roams in Africa are usually as deadly a “no man’s land” as a battlefield. The tsetse causes sleeping sickness indomestic animals, as well as in man. “Cultivation of these lands depends upon the labour of a man with a hoe,” Dr. Buxton said in a paper prepared for the International Congress on Tropical Medicine. “The impossibility of using horses or oxen in these regions has greatly retarded the penetration of Africa by foreign civilisation.” He estimated that 4,500,000 square miles of Africa is infested by the fly. Only recently scientists have been able to clear large areas. This is done by a combination of methods. The fly killer, DDT, is effective, but cannot be used over such a vast area because of cost and other considerations. Fly traps are used in some places. When wild game is destroyed completely in an area the flies may disappear. Clearing away certain vegetation also has helped. Dr Buxton said that in Nigeria an area of 700 square miles was cleared and there are now 50,000 healthy people there, with cattle. In Rhodesia 6000 square miles were cleared, and the land is being made available to Europeans.