Hero Dream

2002/06/03 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Osasuna

Although AIDS has arrested her prominence, sleep sickness is a serious problem in many places in Africa.

We have ever known plans against sleep disease contaminated by the tse-tse fly. But the plan, the disease is in effect. The problem is that AIDS is a ‘fashionable’ disease, with almost absolute prominence, but sleep disease causes more than 300,000 deaths a year (the largest number since 1930). The wars and displacements of the great collectivities as a consequence of them also extend the disease to new places.

Health officials believe that for each patient treated in hospitals there are three others untreated.

The last effort is to release sterile male flies. Uganda wants to release one million flies per week for four years. If sterile males are more abundant than fertile males, most females will copulate and burn sterile eggs, that is, they will have no offspring and the disease that is spread by flies will disappear, according to some experts.