Sleeping Sickness Commission

The Sleeping Sickness Commission was a medical project established by the British Royal Society to investigate the outbreak of African sleeping sickness or African trypanosomiasis in Africa at the turn of the 20th century.[1] The outbreak of the disease started in 1900 in Uganda, which was at the time a protectorate of the British Empire.[2] The initial team in 1902 consisted of Aldo Castellani and George Carmichael Low, both from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Cuthbert Christy, a medical officer on duty in Bombay, India.[3] From 1903, David Bruce of the Royal Army Medical Corps and David Nunes Nabarro of the University College Hospital took over the leadership.[4] The commission established that species of blood protozoan called Trypanosoma brucei, named after Bruce, was the causative parasite of sleeping sickness.

  1. ^ Fèvre, E. M.; Coleman, P. G.; Welburn, S. C.; Maudlin, I. (2004). "Reanalyzing the 1900-1920 sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda". Emerging Infectious Diseases. 10 (4): 567–573. doi:10.3201/eid1004.020626. PMID 15200843.
  2. ^ Berrang-Ford, Lea; Odiit, Martin; Maiso, Faustin; Waltner-Toews, David; McDermott, John (2006). "Sleeping sickness in Uganda: revisiting current and historical distributions". African Health Sciences. 6 (4): 223–231. PMC 1832067. PMID 17604511.
  3. ^ Boyd, J. (1973). "Sleeping sickness. The Castellani-Bruce controversy". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 28: 93–110. doi:10.1098/rsnr.1973.0008. PMID 11615538. S2CID 37631020.
  4. ^ Parker, G. D. (1909). "Sleeping sickness". Science Progress in the Twentieth Century (1906-1916). 3 (12): 657–666. JSTOR 43777526.