THE RHODESIAN DISEASE 9 



are frequently discovered in the forbidden areas by the 

 patrolling canoes. 



By these means the inhabitants of Uganda were saved, 

 and at the present day there are very few deaths a year ; 

 from 1905-1917 there were just over 30,000 deaths for 

 the whole of the Uganda Protectorate. 



At the end of 1909 considerable alarm was caused 

 by the discovery in Nyassaland of Sleeping Sickness 

 (or rather. Acute Trypanosomiasis) in a native there, 

 and since then a number of cases have been found, some 

 of them Europeans, in Nj^'assaland, North-East Rhodesia, 

 and Portuguese East Africa : in the case of some natives, 

 they had certainly never left their homes. This was 

 very interesting from a scientific point of view, because 

 Glossina palpalis, the species of Tse-tse which carries 

 Sleeping Sickness in Uganda and the West Coast, does 

 not exist in those countries. 



It was soon found that the carrier was another species, 

 namely, the very one which has been so long known to 

 travellers in Africa as the cause of Tse-tse fly disease or 

 " Nagana " of horses, cattle and dogs. 



This species is known as Glossina morsitans.^ 



As this new form of human Trypanosomiasis appeared 

 to be very much more acute than the form known as 

 Sleeping Sickness, the discovery was disconcerting. It 

 is, however, possible that our ideas of the severity of 

 this form of Trypanosomiasis will need to be modified 

 in the light of further knowledge, for during the campaign 

 in East Africa a number of natives were found to have 

 Trypanosomes in their blood while under treatment 

 for other complaints, and appeared to be little the worse 

 for their presence ; these natives had not been in the area 

 of Glossina palpalis, so that either the Trypanosome was 

 gambiense carried by morsitans, or else it was rhodesiense 



^ Kinghorn and Yorke, Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, 

 1912, vol. 6, pp. 1-23. 



