%0 Journal Article
%T Civil conflict and sleeping sickness in Africa in general and Uganda in particular
%A Lea Berrang Ford
%J Conflict and Health
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1752-1505-1-6
%X Sleeping sickness re-emerged in Uganda in the 1970s, and continues to pose a public health and economic burden [1-3]. Similar re-emergence has been reported across sub-Saharan Africa since the 1970s, including outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan [4], and Angola [5]. In many cases, sleeping sickness outbreaks have coincided with periods of civil conflict and instability in affected countries and regions. Conflict in this context refers to the occurrence of civil war, rebel insurgency, violent governance, political or military oppression of populations, and military combat. These temporal associations are not purely spurious; patterns and processes related to conflict have been identified as determinants of sleeping sickness incidence and outbreaks [4,5]. An improved understanding of the specific processes linking conflict to sleeping sickness incidence can guide geographical predictions of disease risk and optimization of intervention resources. This paper provides a review and characterization of the processes by which conflict has contributed to the occurrence of sleeping sickness outbreaks across sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on south-eastern Uganda (Figure 1).Sleeping sickness is the name used to describe the human form of African trypanosomiasis (Trypanosoma spp.), a protozoan parasitic disease affecting humans, livestock, and a large number of sylvatic species in much of sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 1). Transmitted by the tsetse fly vector (Glossina spp.), trypanosomiasis represents an important public health and economic burden in sub-Saharan Africa [6-8]. Sleeping sickness is characterized by highly variable and non-specific symptoms in its early stages [9], which are often mis-diagnosed as malaria [10]. Late stage sleeping sickness includes body weakness, progressive emaciation, slurred speech, mental confusion, and coma leading to death in all untreated cases [9]. There are two sub-species of human-infectious trypanosomes, includ
%U http://www.conflictandhealth.com/content/1/1/6