A new medical approach has been successful to save thousands of lives in Africa against the fatal infection of sleeping sickness. Scientists from Edinburgh University in Scotland announced that 90 percent of all acute cases in rural Uganda dropped due to a drug injected to cattle that kills the parasite before harming humans.

The deadly condition is a parasitic infection that comes from domestic cattle. Sleeping sickness commonly affects the nervous system that can be fatal without the necessary treatment.

The infection can be transmitted from cattle to humans through the tsetse fly, affecting people like malaria. In Uganda, researchers said that domestic cattle have been the main "reservoir of infection" in several years.

The tsetse flies that transmit the infection tend to enter the blood, multiply and move to the central nervous system. These parasites affect the body with “profound problems and really quite extraordinary symptoms,” according to Professor Susan Welburn, lead researcher and vice principal for global access of Edinburgh University.

"It is absolutely fatal if it is not treated," she told BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme. Humans are only affected by the infection as cattle were found to be resistant to the disease.

Despite the infection affecting thousands of people, many patients were unaware of the risk from domestic cattle. The researchers added that patients from poorest rural areas were unable to access a treatment before the new intervention.

However, the new effective drug prevented and significantly reduced the transmission to humans by killing the parasite directly in domestic cattle.

The tests of the new treatment were done in 500,000 cows. The researchers were able to kill the trypanosome parasite that causes the disease by giving the livestock a single injection of trypanocide drug and conducting regular insecticide spraying to avoid relapse of infection.

Welburn said that the new treatment is far cheaper than available drugs used in humans to fight the infection.

The test was part of the Stamp Out Sleeping Sickness (SoSS) campaign of the University of Edinburgh that started in 2006. The campaign is supported by the government of Uganda, the global veterinary health company Ceva Sante Animale and the University of Makerere.

To date, the SoS campaign is estimated to have saved human health care costs by about US$400 million (approx. AU$568 million). The researchers are planning to extend the project to all districts in Uganda that are affected by sleeping sickness, which would treat about 2.7 million heads of cattle.

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