Facts On Infection & Risk Factors For African Trypanosomiasis

Outbreaks

There have been several outbreaks of African trypanosomiasis over the last hundred years. The first occurred mainly in Uganda and the Congo Basin from 1896 to 1906. An outbreak took place in Uganda in 1901 and killed approximately two-thirds of the population in certain areas. The death toll was more than 250,000 individuals. Other estimates reported almost half the citizens in the region surrounding the banks of the lower river Congo died during this time as a result of the disease and smallpox. Another epidemic took place in 1920 throughout several African countries. It was eventually brought under control by mobile teams who performed screenings of at-risk populations, which numbered in the millions. Less than five thousand cases were reported in the entire continent by the mid-1960s. The most recent outbreak happened in several regions of the continent. It began sometime in 1970 and lasted almost thirty years. The infection rate was ultimately brought under control by the World Health Organization and other organizations throughout the 1990s and early part of the twenty-first century.