Sleeping Sickness.

Marlborough Express, Volume XXXVII, Issue 42, 20 February 1903, Page 5 (Supplement)

Sleeping Sickness.

♦ — - — A CURIOUS DISEASE. The terrible havoc which negro leth-' argy, or the sleeping sickness, is causing among tbe natives in Uganda has created considerable interest in that carious and deadly disease. In an able work, entitled, " Tropical Diseases," by Dr Patrick Hanson, C.M.G., M.D., L.L.P., medical I adviser to the Colonial Office, and published by Oassell and Company in 1900, we learn that the disease is, so far as is known, limited to Tropical West Africa. It is characterised by i slowly increasing lethargy and by many other nervous phenomena. After a chronic course, it terminates in death. Its visitations seem to come and go. After decimating a village it may quite disappear for a time, migrating temporarily, as it were, to some neighbouring village. Accurate information is wanting on this as on many other matters relating to this interesting disease. This much, however, is known—that it is an endemic which is liable to epidemio outbursts. So great ia tbe terror of the ' natives when the disease appears amongst them that they sometimes abandon their villages. A peculiarity about sleeping sickness lies in the fact that although it can be acquired in certain places only, the symptoms of the disease may appear for the first time in quite another country and many years (up to seven, the negroes say) after the endemic region has been quitted. Tbe sickness is not exclusively confined to the negro race, but only to the negro country. It has been seen in Mulattos and Moors, and possibly in Europeans* It is unknown as an endemic in the north, east, and south of the African continent, being limited apparently to the basis of the Senegal, the Niger, the Congo, and minor intermediate rivers, i As to the symptoms, Dr Mansoa says : — " Sleeping sickness usually begins very insidiously; more rarely is ushered in by a series of epileptiform seizures, occassionally by a maniacal attack. Those who are familiar with the disease are said to be able to recognise it in its earliest stages. The patient acquires a peculiar listless and morose manner, a somewhat melancholy expression' of countenance, a certain fulness and puffiness about the face, a drooping of the upper eyelids. He is liable to headache, to attacks of vertigo, to evanescent flashes of fever, sometimes to diarrhoea and other intestinal disorders. By-and-by, after a variable period of weeks or months, he begins to experience a feeling of excessive lassitude, and of some disinclination or inability for the daily task; generally, too, there is a desire and liability to fall off lo sleep at unusual times. 'He may fall asleep while at work, while at his amusements, and even while he is eating. Hb is readily fatigued. When he does speak, he may complain of weakness. He appears to feel chilly, for he likes to. lie about in the sun. The lethargy and somnolence get better and worse; on the whole, they tend slowly to increase. By-and-by the patient! seeks to seclude himself. He ceases to take part in conversation, although when obliged to speak or to answer a question he may do so intelligently enough. Gradually he becomes more silent, more taciturn, and he sleeps, or rather, appears to Bleep, almos' constantly. If he is forced to walk !or move about he does so as if halfawake or as if intoxicated." After further describing the symptoms as the disease progresses, iDr Manson says :—" Gradually lethargy deepens, nutrition fails, the body wastes, bed sores extend, and finally the patient may become comatose, and so die, or he may sink from slowly advancing asthenia."— Cape Times.