Latest Tsetse fly Stories
Connie K. Ho for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Scientists from the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently revealed that X-rays could provide information on a novel biological structure that could possibly be developed into a sleeping sickness drug. The findings were discovered with the help of a free-electron laser that is considered the most powerful in the world. Sleeping disease...
Lies Van Nieuwenhove, researcher at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, has produced proteins imitating typical parts of the sleeping sickness parasite. They can be used in more efficient diagnostic tests, without the need for culturing dangerous parasites. Each year many thousands of Africans contract sleeping sickness. The cause is a unicellular parasite, a trypanosome, which is transmitted by the bite of tsetse flies. First the parasite multiplies in blood and lymph, while...
For the first time, scientists have created a satellite-guided plan to effectively control the tsetse fly – an African killer that spreads “sleeping sickness” disease among humans and animals and wipes out $4.5 billion in livestock every year. Michigan State University researchers developed the plan using a decade’s worth of NASA satellite images of Kenyan landscape and by monitoring tsetse movement. With unprecedented precision, the plan can tell where and when to direct...
Targeting the vital enzymes in female flies could aid tsetse reduction efforts An unprecedented study of intra-uterine lactation in the tsetse fly, published 18 April 2012 in Biology of Reproduction's Papers-in-Press, reveals that an enzyme found in the fly's milk functions similarly in mammals, making the tsetse a potential model for lipid metabolism during mammalian lactation. Better yet, reduced levels of this enzyme led to poor health in offspring, leading the authors to suggest...
Research led by scientists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has exploited a revolutionary genetic technique to discover how human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) drugs target the parasite which causes the disease. The new knowledge could help lead to the development of better treatments for the tens of thousands of people in sub-Saharan Africa who are affected each year. The findings, published in Nature, are based on the simultaneous analysis of thousands of genes and...
A new study published in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases on September 6th presents a key advance in developing a safer cure for sleeping sickness. Led by Professor Peter Kennedy, researchers at the University of Glasgow's Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation have created a version of the drug most commonly used to treat sleeping sickness which can be administered orally in pill form. Sleeping sickness – or human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) –...
An international research team using a new combination of approaches has found two genes that may prove of vital importance to the lives and livelihoods of millions of farmers in a tsetse fly-plagued swathe of Africa the size of the United States. The team's results were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).The research, aimed at finding the biological keys to protection from a single-celled trypanosome parasite that causes both African sleeping...
Research presented at American Society of Cell Biology's 50th annual meeting in PhiladelphiaLong considered a freewheeling loner, the Trypanosoma brucei parasite responsible for African sleeping sickness has revealed a totally unexpected social side, opening a potential chink in the behavioral armor of this and other supposedly solitary human parasites, according to research presented at the American Society for Cell Biology's 50th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia."The concept of bacteria...
Investigation of new drugs to treat parasitic diseaseUrgently-needed new treatment for a parasitic disease is being investigated in research led at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland.Human African Trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, affects between 50,000 and 70,000 people in Africa and South America. It is transmitted through the bite of the tsetse fly and attacks the nervous system and brain, leading to fever, headaches and disturbed sleep patterns.Without...
Fresh discoveries about the parasite that causes sleeping sickness could lead to new avenues of research into treatments for the disease.Scientists studying the parasite "“ which is spread by the tsetse fly and infects the blood of people and animals "“ have shed light on how it is able to survive when taken up by a feeding fly.Sleeping sickness is a potentially fatal condition which affects up to 70,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, and millions more are at risk from the...
