Trypanosomiasis control in african history: An evaded issue?

Abstract

In his The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology (1971), John Ford placed human and bovine trypanosomiasis squarely in the realm of human history. Ford believed that precolonial African societies successfully coexisted with trypanosomiasis. They achieved protection against the disease, he thought, by modifying their environment in ways which affected the sizes of and interaction among the five populations involved in the transmission of trypanosomiasis — humans, their livestock, wild fauna, tsetse flies and the trypanosome parasites. Ford believed that undomesticated mammals are the primary hosts of trypanosome blood parasites. Trypanosomes are carried between hosts by flies of the genus Glossina. It is these tsetse vectors which inoculate humans and domesticated animals with trypanosomes. Ford contended that precolonial African societies had developed means of regulating human and livestock contacts with tsetse and that, as long as these controls remained in operation, people and their domestic animals experienced light, infrequent infection that allowed them to acquire resistance against the trypanosome parasites. Epidemics and epizootics of trypanosomiasis occurred in the colonial period because Africans lost control of interaction among the various populations. © 1990, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.