Tsetse Fly

The blackest horror in darkest Africa is sleeping sickness. Very different from encephalitis lethargica, the sleeping sickness found in the U. S., this disease is caused by trypanosomes (parasitic protozoa) carried by the tsetse fly. Its toll is about 100,000 human victims a year and all the domestic animals the tsetse fly can find.

The earliest description of the disease was given by British Naval Surgeon John Atkins on his return from West Africa in 1734. He wrote: "The Sleepy Distemper (common among the Negroes) gives no other previous Notice, than a want of Appetite two or three days before; their sleeps are sound, and Sense and Feeling very little; for pulling,drubbing or whipping will scarce stir up Sense and Power enough to move; and the Moment you cease beating the smart is forgot, and down they fall again into a state of Insensibility, drivling constantly from the Mouth as if in deep salivation; breathe slowly, but not unequally nor snort. Young people are more subject to it than the old; and the Judgment generally pronounced is Death, the Prognostick seldom failing. If now and then one of them recovers he certainly loses the little Reason he had, and turns Ideot. . . ."

Soon a U. S. youth will leave for the Belgian Congo, to battle with the tsetse fly. He is Dr. Warren K. Stratman-Thomas, 28, research pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin, A. B., M. A., Ph. D., M. D., Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation which annually sends 75 young U. S. scholars, scientists, artists, to study in all parts of the world.

His luggage will consist largely of an arsenical arsenal: six different arsenical compounds which have already been tried on animals, found superior to Bayer 205.*Best of them all is Arsenical No. 130, in which tear gas aids and abets arsenic to destroy the trypanosomes, restoring the sufferer to normalcy. Dr. Clement C. Chesterman, who has spent years in the Belgian Congo, will cooperate with Pharmacologist Stratman-Thomas to turn the jungle into a vast clinic, inoculating thousands of infected natives and animals with the drugs. They will follow epidemics around Africa, maintaining a base at Leopoldville, Congo capital.

The new compounds were prepared under the direction of Professor A. B. Loevenhart of Wisconsin. He believes the conquest of African sleeping sickness would be equivalent to the discovery of a continent. But more than Africa is at stake. Before the War the tsetse fly was unknown in Arabia; in recent years it has turned up there. Also strange new diseases of camels have developed in Palestine, similar to sleeping sickness; caused by trypanosomes. Finally, laymen are startled when Pharmacologist Stratman-Thomas tells them that: "In prehistoric times this fly lived in the Americas and fossils of some twenty-odd species have been found in the Colorado shales. Since the evolution of the horse can be most satisfactorily traced in the West, and since it seems there were no horses in America at the time of

Columbus, it seems quite possible that the vast herds of horses were wiped out by a trypanosomal disease carried by the tsetse fly."

The coming year will see Guggenheim Fellows at Mazelspoort, South Africa, photographing the southern sky; in Mexico and Costa Rica studying Central American reptiles and amphibians; in France composing symphonies, writing verse, studying theatre; in Italy painting and sculpting; in Sumatra studying primitive religion; in Cambridge, England; Charlottenburg, Munich, Berlin, Tubingen, Gottingen, Germany; studying theories of radiation, thermomagnetic properties of gaseous molecules, quantum mechanics in relation to band spectra. They will investigate low temperature effects on plants in northern Russia; rare species of lung fishes near Cairo and Khartoum; interstitial cells of the nervous system in London; Norwegian immigration to the U. S. in Norway; the youth of Erasmus; mediaeval theories of rhetoric; the life and ideas of Mrs. Hannah More, 1780 to 1830; post War economic readjustment in Germany, etc.

*Bayer 205 is the much vaunted German compound, the formula of which was offered at a price, viz.; the restoration of Germany's colonies in Africa. (TIME, July 21, 1924.)