- VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N.
nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday it would use nuclear technology to help
rid Africa of the deadly tsetse fly.
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- Half a million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated
to have been infected with sleeping sickness by the tsetse fly and 80 percent
of them will likely die, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
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- Annual economic losses are put at $4.5 billion.
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- The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
said in a statement the tsetse fly, which carries the parasite that causes
sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in animals, was killing three million
livestock animals every year.
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- "The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate,"
said John Kabayo, regional coordinator for the Pan African Tsetse and Trypanosomosis
Eradication Campaign (PATTEC), inaugurated by the Organization of African
Unity.
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- "It's no accident that the concentration of much
of the world's most acute poverty is in regions of sub-Saharan Africa infested
with it," he said.
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- The WHO estimates that in some parts of the war-torn
Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa, sleeping sickness is killing
more people than any other communicable disease, including HIV/AIDS.
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- But Kabayo said there was hope in combating the epidemic,
which began in the mid 1970s. Recently, the IAEA helped Zanzibar to rid
itself of the tsetse by using a combination of conventional pesticides
and nuclear technology.
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- STERILE MALES
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- The process is simple. Tsetse flies are bred in special
centers and the males are exposed to a short burst of radiation, rendering
them sterile.
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- After pesticides have sharply reduced the population,
the sterilized males are released in large numbers into the breeding population,
heavily outnumbering fertile males in the fight to mate. Over time, the
tsetse population falls to zero.
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- "You do most of the work with chemicals, which takes
months to achieve, and then you hit it with the sterilized insects to bring
that 95 percent eradication to 100 percent," IAEA entomologist Arnold
Dyck told Reuters.
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- PATTEC has already begun working with governments to
implement the IAEA's two-step process of wiping out the fly in Botswana,
Mali and Ethiopia.
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- The region-by-region process has to fight constantly
against the threat of re-infestation of tsetse-free areas. "We're
looking at decades before we've eradicated the fly from all of Africa,"
said Dyck.
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- The economic benefits of the program are clear. PATTEC's
Kabayo said that once Zanzibar began its campaign against the tsetse fly,
milk production tripled, beef production doubled and the number of farmers
who fertilized crops with manure jumped five-fold.
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- Scientists have failed to produce a traditional vaccine
for humans or cattle because once in the blood, the trypanosome parasites,
which the tsetse fly passes on, can change their outer protein coat into
at least 1,000 variants.
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- The disease first attacks the body's immune system and
then the central nervous system. However, drugs designed to treat the illness
are either highly toxic or so difficult to administer that they become
virtually unusable.
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- The disease can be treated if detected early but the
WHO said only a fraction of those at risk were being screened.
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