Tag: "sickness" at biology news

Newly discovered protein an important tool for sleeping sickness research

Sixty million people in 36 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are threatened daily by a deadly parasitic disease known as African sleeping sickness. The disease is caused by organisms called trypanosomes, which are spread by the tsetse fly. African sleeping sickness affects approximately 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, a quarter of whom will die this year. Because the trypanosome has an except...

Sleeping Sickness Epidemic Spreading in Uganda

A drug first used to reduce the risk of stomach ulcers in people taking certain types of painkillers offers an alternative to surgery after miscarriage, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health and other research institutions. .. . The drug, misoprostol, has been used to reduce the risk of stomach ulce...

Compound might defeat African sleeping sickness, clinical trial beginning this month

One of the most devastating diseases in sub-Saharan Africa almost disappeared in the late 1950s. That disease, African sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, largely succumbed to heroic public health efforts -- including relocating entire villages. But in the past several decades, because of post-colonial turmoil, the catastrophic illness has come back to ravage parts of Angola, the Democratic Re...

Sleeping sickness parasite shows how cells divide their insides

Researchers at Yale have brought to light a mechanism that regulates the way an internal organelle, the Golgi apparatus, duplicates as cells prepare to divide, according to a report in Science Express. . , and his colleagues at Yale study Trypanosoma brucei, the parasite that causes Sleeping Sickness. Like many parasites, it is exceptionally streamlined and has only one of each internal organelle...

A large step forward in the fight against African sleeping sickness

Each year, over 300,000 people die of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Free University of Brussels are making strides in the battle against this disease. . They have coupled the human protein ApoL-1 with a nanobody in order to very specifically eliminate the infection caused by the pathog...

Resistance and genetic sensitivity to sleeping sickness

Human African trypanosomiasis, more commonly called sleeping sickness, is induced by a parasite, the trypanosome, transmitted to humans by the bite of an insect, the glossinid tse-tse fly. There has been a resurgence of this disease over the past 20 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) in a 1998 report estimated the number of people infected to be about 300 000. Awaren...

New study suggests promising drug combinations for sleeping sickness

Results from a clinical trial evaluating new drug combinations for sleeping sickness, carried out by the international humanitarian medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and its research arm, Epicentre, have now been published in the journal PLoS Clinical Trials. . African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness affects many tens of thousands of people each year in sub-Saharan Afr...