Report on the measures adopted for the suppression of sleeping sickness in Uganda / by Sir H. Hesketh Bell ; presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of His Majesty.

  • Great Britain. Colonial Office.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Report on the measures adopted for the suppression of sleeping sickness in Uganda / by Sir H. Hesketh Bell ; presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of His Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    For the service of 1909-10 the sum of £11,273 was provided in the approved estimates, and it is believed that the expenditure will be kept within that limit. 61. When making my estimate in 1906, I assumed that, in view of what we knew of the nature of the disease, everyone suffering from sleeping sickness would, in three years, either be , dead or cured. We must confess that, as regards the segregation camps, we are faced with a situation which we had not foreseen. The patients are, api)arently not being cured, but neither are they dying as rapidly as they used to. The result is that, unless a cure be speedily discovered, the Government will be compelled to continue to maintain, for an indefinite period, a considerable number of unfortunates who are destitute and in a hopeless con- dition. The position is one that must be faced. Sir David Bruce’s Mission to Uganda. 62. In November, 1908, Colonel Sir David Bruce returned to Uganda under the auspices of the Royal Society, to make further researches into the study of sleeping sickness. He was accom- panied by Lady Bruce and by Captains Hamerton, Bateman, and Mackie. The party were accommodated at a well equipped laboratory in the neighbourhood of the segregation camp in Chagwe and within reach of a fly-infested area. The result of their investigations will, doubtless, soon be made known. 63. Early in the current year it became necessary to modify, to a considerable degree, the theories which had, up to then, received general acceptance as to the part played by Glossina palpalis in the transmission of sleeping sickness. It had been accepted as a fact that an infected tsetse fly carried the disease from one person to another by a simple and direct transmission of the tr;vT)anosome, and that, after a '^>eriod of about forty-eight hours the fly, unless re-infected in the meantime, ceased to be infective. On the strength of this theory it was hoped that, by removing from the neighbourhood of the tsetse flies every possible source of re-infection, the insects would, after two or three days, become as innocuous as they appear to have been before sleeping sickness was introduced into the country. It was on this theory that we based all our measures for the suppression of the disease in Uganda. Dr. Kleine’s Discovery. 64. In February of the current year Dr. Kleine, who had worked with Professor Koch in Sesse, and who was then in charge of a sleeping sickness camp in German East Africa, announced that experiments made by him had proved conclusively that the transmission of sleeping sickness was not a simple mechanical act, but that, on the contrary, ]t was necessary that the trypano- some should pass through a. cycle in the internal organisation of the fly. He stated that the process took at least 17 days, and that a fly was incapable of transmitting the disease until the expiration of that period. Dr. Kleine further reported that his