Drowsing Death

The white hunters oiled their guns. In the Zulu villages the old men rolled their eyes as they chattered of the slaughter to come--whole herds of galloping zebras and wildebeests to be stalked and shot to stop nagana--native name for a form of African sleeping sickness. Harmless to game animals, nagana is deadly to domestic cattle, with a mortality rate of close to 50%. It is carried by a tsetse fly (Glossina morsitans) closely related to the tsetse (G. palpalis) which infects man.

Last week the South African Government ordered the slaughter of 15,000 game animals in Zululand. The hope was that no game would mean no nagana. The great Hluhluwe Reserve, last home of the white rhinoceros, will not be invaded, but in the surrounding areas the waterbuck and hartebeest, the dainty duiker and the lordly kudu*--all the smooth-haunched animals on whose bellies the tsetse feeds--will be exterminated by professional hunters under supervision of the government.

Although nagana is not known in the U.S., other drowsing diseases are. Recently Colonel John C. Woodland and Major Emmett M. Smith of the Army Medical Corps reported in the A.M.A. Journal: "Epidemics of acute infectious encephalitis are increasing in frequency and severity." Treating 13 soldiers at Fort Sam Houston last summer, the two Army doctors verified the belief that the disease may exist clinically in the U.S. without positive laboratory identification. Epidemic encephalitis, erroneously called "sleeping sickness," is not related to the curse of Africa but it has many of the same symptoms and apparently shares the same animal-insect-man cycle.

The soldiers who suffered from it came down with the disease about a month after a local epidemic of encephalitis among the horses. So, the two Army doctors urge, medical doctors should work closely with veterinarians, since horses can be immunized almost 100%. Hooper Foundation researchers in California and Washington have recently proved that many barnyard animals, principally domestic fowl, act as reservoirs for the virus, presumably transferred to man by mosquitoes.

In the epidemic of encephalitis which broke out in 1941 in North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan the 2,792 cases were mainly among farmers and others who handle horses. About 12% of the victims died. Many others were left with damaged minds and spastic muscles since encephalitis--like poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis)--primarily attacks the nervous system.

* For a lordly account of the lordly kudu, see Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa.

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