Protection against one of Africa’s oldest animal plagues

An international research team, including University of Manchester scientists, 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 team's results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) , is aimed at finding the biological keys to protection from a single-celled trypanosome parasite that causes both African sleeping sickness in people and a wasting disease in cattle. The disease, which affects people and animals in a vast swathe of Africa the size of the USA, brought together a range of high-tech tools and field observations to address a critical affliction of some of the world's poorest people. Sleeping sickness affects an estimated 300,000 Africans each year, eventually killing more than half of them. Although best known for causing human sleeping sickness, the trypanosome parasite's most devastating blow to human welfare comes in an animal form, with sick, unproductive cattle costing farmers and herders huge losses and opportunities. The annual economic impact of 'Nagana', a common name in Africa for the form of the disease that affects cattle (officially known as African animal trypanosomiasis), has been estimated at US$4-5 billion. In a vast tsetse belt across Africa, stretching from Senegal on the west coast to Tanzania on the east coast, and from Chad in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, the disease each year renders millions of cattle too weak to plow land or to haul loads, and too sickly to give milk or to breed, before finally killing off most of those infected.