New technique to help learn about African sleeping sickness

A special genetic tracing technique is bringing new hope to explain why drug treatment is often ineffective for African sleeping sickness, a frightening tropical disease.

The work could lead to the development of better new drugs to help control this potentially lethal disease.

African sleeping sickness is caused by trypanosoma brucei parasite when the sick person is burned by a fly tse tse. If left untreated, the disease attacks the central nervous system and often kills.

This disease occurs in Africa in the Sahara. In 2008, an estimated 48,000 people died from the disease.

Experts said that the majority of sleeping cases were not reported, so the number of deaths could be higher.

There are five types of drugs used to treat African sleeping sickness, but how effective these drugs are, or how parasites have developed resistance to the disease, is what people don't understand.

An old drug - melarsoprol, contains arsenic poisoning and can cause arsenic poisoning symptoms such as seizures, fever, unconsciousness, vomiting, and continues to be used to treat sleeping sickness, as this is a poisonous disease and because other drugs are very expensive and difficult to use.

Specialist David Horn at the London School of Medicine specializes in Tropical Hygiene, and is the one who guides efforts to study the parasite's resistance to existing treatments.

He said: 'If we understand resistance, then we can actually test for resistant parasites and thus guide intervention techniques to use for each patient.' .

The trypanosome parasite has only one cell and the cell contains about 7,000 genes. Scientists use a special technique to isolate each gene so that 50 genes that produce resistance-related proteins can be found.

"The immediate goal of scientists is to understand how parasites have formed resistance," Horn said. At some point, he added, research could help develop other drugs.

"If we understand how well existing drugs work, we can transfer that information to make other effective drugs," he said.

The article about resistance to sleeping sickness was published in Nature.