| April
30th 2009
The first Europeans in the country that is now
Uganda were looking for the source of the River Nile.
South and East of the River Nile's most distant
stream lay the Kingdom of Busago. The Kingdom was reported to have
been rich with people and farms. Thirty years later the population
was decimated by sleeping sickness. The estimate is that a quarter
of a million people disappeared.
A tsetse fly bites like a horse fly. It
hurts. In some places there are tsetse fly, but no sleeping
sickness. In some places there are no tsetse fly to be found at
all.
|
Sleeping sickness has two phases. The first is
often mistaken for HIV. The second phase attacks the nervous
system. It takes about six months to die.
In the 1960's the battle with tsetse fly was nearly
won, but greed and politics and war and ambitious generals have given the
tsetse fly back to the people of Uganda.
Previous Next
|
