Although the name may make it sound like no big deal, sleeping sickness is the consequence of parasites transmitted by tsetse flies which travel to the brain, once there, paranoia, fury, comas and death follows. This is why its great to hear that the illness can now be combatted with a medication that relies on pills alone. Specifically, now that the treatment has been radically simplified, sleeping sickness could possibly become completely eradicated, experts said, due to the fact that there are usually fewer than 2,000 cases in the world each year.
Now, if you are thinking that the cure isn’t anything that significant due to it only affecting a tiny minority of the global population you would be wrong as the damage caused by the illness reaches far further than just the individual. In fact, the disease, also called human African trypanosomiasis, causes dramatic changes in the infected’s personality, as well as causing them to have terrifying hallucinations and fly into rages with some cases even seeing the individual beat their children and attack family members with machetes. Furthermore, they may become ravenous and scream with pain if water touches their skin, this is before they inevitably fall into a long coma and die.
As you can imagine, the suffering that will now be avoided is tremendous as the new drug, fexinidazole, cures all stages of the disease within 10 days. What a remarkable scientific achievement.
