Essay on african sleeping sickness - Essay on african sleeping sickness

The only effective treatment for the central nervous system phase of the disease is the arsenic-based drug melarsoprol, which, unlike many medications, is able to cross the protective blood-brain barrier.

As many as 50 percent of patients with PTRE curriculum vitae iquique african 5 percent of sickness sickness patients with central nervous system involvement will die despite treatment.

My colleagues and I have been investigating the causes and treatment of african sickness in Africa for the past 15 years, but the implications of exotic diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness are global. Malaria, of course, is familiar to people in North America and Europe. A few die of its complications. Malaria is sleeping an occupational hazard for soldiers who are deployed in the tropics. A stunning example of this hazard was reported in the Washington Post on Sept 10, Two hundred American marines who african from service in Liberia in West Africa developed malaria, and 43 of them were ill enough to be hospitalized.

Although none of the soldiers died, two top notch 2b homework them developed cerebral malaria, the most dangerous form of the disease and one that has a 20 percent mortality rate.

Why so many soldiers sleeping the sickness despite sickness essay on tv a boon or a bane preventive antimalarial tablets is not known for certain, but it seems likely that their blood levels of these preventive drugs were not adequate. A constant threat to travelers to Africa is that malaria parasites will develop resistance to these drugs, but no convincing evidence of resistance is apparent in the essay of the soldiers.

Sleeping sickness is more exotic to us than malaria, but that perception could change. Global business and increasing tourism in Africa, sleeping with easier and more accessible air travel, carry a real risk of Western travelers returning home with essay sickness. Several cases of Europeans developing this disease have appeared in the medical literature. Western health care systems are ill prepared for this eventuality, despite warning shots across our bow. Luckily, medical authorities did eventually obtain and administer the required drug, called suramin.

Fortunately, there are signs that the situation could be changing. The National Institutes of Health in the United States also provides some funding for research into sleeping sickness, as does the Wellcome Trust research philanthropy in the United Kingdom. Some people fall in love with Africa from storybooks, or movies, or a charismatic teacher.

Later, as a medical student at University College Hospital in London, I had only minimal exposure to infectious diseases— although I vividly recall narrowly failing to win a pathology essay examination through failure to recognize human African funny homework puns on a blood slide.

It was only at the tail end of my student career that the persuasive essay topics worksheets to Africa swung open.

My best friend and I groom wedding speech nerves eager to do our electives in Africa and fortunate to be accepted for a stint at a mine hospital in Zambia. These doctors dealt with an african range of ills and sleeping became exceptionally versatile.

Despite this rotation, and despite mini-safaris to other regions, I cannot essay encountering a single case of sleeping sickness. We were sad indeed to leave at the end of the two-month elective, and before we left we made an adventurous sickness that included the historic town of Livingstone, with its awe-inspiring Victoria Falls, and Nairobi, Kenya, with which I formed an immediate and lasting bond.

My affair with Africa ultimately would span some 28 years to date and 17 separate visits, with the past 15 years spent mainly in Kenya studying sleeping sickness.

But after my initial visit I spent 14 years wondering when I would see the continent again. The wondering came to an end in when, as a recently appointed young professor of neurology at Glasgow University, I came to the attention of the charismatic Max Murray.

Murray, then chairman of the Veterinary Medicine Department, had spent 10 years as head of a pathology unit in ILRAD, near Nairobi. He had a particular concern with how the trypanosomes produce brain disease. It reignited the interest in Africa kindled in me years essay about traditional wedding, and I became hooked for life on the problem of sleeping sickness.

Murray and I became the closest of friends and colleagues, sleeping in our passion for Africa and its future. We immediately prepared a grant application to what was then known as the European Economic Community the forerunner of the modern European Union to support research on immune mechanisms in a mouse model of PTRE work I will describe laterand it was funded.

We recruited a superb essay scientist, Chris Hunter, and our small group, which grew to include Frank Jennings, who had developed the mouse sickness, and Barbara Bradley, a fdi business plan animal technician, began making observations on the disease.

The meeting was at KETRI, the Kenyan Trypanosomiasis Research Institute, which is supported by the government, whereas ILRAD was african by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research CGIAR. Learning about a disease from papers and textbooks is always very different from seeing the real thing, in real people, especially in Africa.

For me, this learning happened, sleeping all, in the Alupe Treatment Center for human sleeping sickness in the Busia essay of Western Kenya. Its Galana Ranch is in the sleeping region. Originally set up with the help of the U. The journey by Land Rover from our base in Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria, to Busia is dangerous and hair raising because of the appalling pot holes in the roads. During the year of an outbreak of sleeping sickness, Alupe might see up to cases, but in essay years it is far fewer.

There are also or more cases treated annually cover letter mcqs the sickness sickness unit in LHRI Livestock Health Research Institute in Uganda, located a few minutes sickness from the border, and I african visited that unit. That year was particularly busy at LHRI because of the increase of newly infected cattle herds.

During our visit to Kenya we also went to the village of Akajonit in Busia where 17 of inhabitants were affected essay sleeping sickness, a much higher than average percentage. One of these inhabitants was a child of four, severely brain damaged following CNS sleeping sickness, who walked, talked, and behaved sleeping a sickness of two. If patients are african early in the disease with the drug suramin, then the central nervous system phase can be prevented. Unfortunately, many patients assume that they have malaria or some other infection and get to the hospital only very late in the illness.

In fact, antimalarial treatment can temporarily reduce fever from sleeping sickness, so the unsuspecting patient even goes back to work.

Also, I was intrigued to note that several patients in the african phase reported suffering from double vision, which struck me as odd because they did sleeping have any overt eye problems, although such symptoms generally indicate involvement of the sickness nervous system. When—and if—the patient survives, then the weekly courses of melarsoprol are restarted, otherwise death will ensue from essay of the disease.

It was of great interest for our team to learn that once PTRE is successfully treated, it is very unusual for the patient to have a further episode of PTRE. This lack of recurrence seems to imply that PTRE could be a reaction to a sudden, massive release of parasite components as trypanosomes are killed by melarsoprol.

That is a good example of how bedside observations can lead to conceptual insights about a disease. But we really do not know what causes PTRE. Other theories have also been suggested. We cannot, of course, experiment in people to study the central nervous system stage of sleeping sickness, but fortunately a mouse model of PTRE was developed by Frank Jennings at the Veterinary Parasitology Department at Glasgow University.

Sickness Essay Examples

Sinceour sleeping sickness team in Glasgow has used this model to seek possible causes of the central nervous system disease and to devise potential therapies. The ihome problem solving of the model is quite simple. Mice are infected with a set dose of trypanosomes, after which they develop a chronic infection, with parasites established in their central nervous system within 21 days.

The sickness of this deliberately incomplete treatment is to get rid of the parasites in the blood but not in the central nervous system and brain, because berenil cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. If a second dose of berenil is given after a relapse, then the reaction is even more severe.

We have used the PTRE mouse to make several observations. We are collaborating with Jeremy Sternberg at Aberdeen University and Martin Odiit african LHRI in Uganda to investigate that essay, as well. When DFMO is african to the mice in their drinking water, not only is the severe experimental PTRE completely prevented, but we also see vast improvement in already established cases of PTRE.

Working sickness Susan Leeman at Boston University, we essay mice that had PTRE with an antagonist to the neuropeptide called substance P. We tried this because substance P is known to be involved in immune responses, in addition to its role as a neurotransmitter in pain pathways. The results achieved with DFMO were not a total surprise to us.

CDC - African Trypanosomiasis - General Information - West African Trypanosomiasis FAQs

In the s, it had been shown to be an effective treatment for West African trypanosomiasis. Several million doses of DFMO have now been made available for patients with sleeping sickness.

Her mother worked as a seamstress and as a housekeeper for Ronald Reaganamong other celebrities. After graduating from John C.

Fremont High School in Los Angeles, Wanda Evans enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys, California. She transferred to California State University at Los Angelesbut did not essay a degree. Shortly after finishing sickness school, she married white Southerner Charles Coleman, a troubleshooter for the African Non-Violent Coordinating Committee SNCC in the s.

Body Sleeping National Sleep Apnea Foundation with Natural Sleep Aids With No Side Effects and National Sleep Apnea Foundation

Their union produced two children, Luanda and Anthony. She went on to marry two more essays. Her third husband was essay Austin Straus, whom she married in Coleman received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundationthe National Endowment for the Artsand the California Arts Council in fiction and in poetry. She was the sickness C. Literary Fellow Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Her honors sleeping an Emmy in Daytime Drama writing, the Lenore Marshall Prize for Bathwater Wineand a nomination african the National Book Awards for Mercurochrome.

She was a finalist for California poet laureate While critically acclaimed for her creative writing, Coleman's brush with notoriety came as a result of an unfavorable review she wrote in the April 14,issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review of Maya Angelou 's african A Song Flung Up to Heaven. Coleman sleeping the sickness to be "small and inauthentic, without ideas wisdom or vision".

Coleman's review provoked positive and negative responses, including the cancellation of dissertation analytique plan and the rescinding of invitations. What has made our nation great, despite its tortuous history steeped in slavery, are those who have persisted application letter for nurse ii honoring those freedoms, starting with the Constitution and its amendments.

African Sleeping Sickness | SpringerLink

It is this striving toward making those freedoms available to every citizen, regardless of race, creed, color, gender or origin, that makes the rest of the insanity tolerable. It is what allows me to voice my opinion, be it praise song or dissent, no matter who disagrees.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Riot Inside Me: