TOPICS OF THE DAY

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20917, 23 September 1939, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY

Fight Against Fly In Africa today numbers of scientific workers are leading lives of isolation and incredible hardship, directing their whole efforts to one aim alone, the extermination of a small insect, the tsetse fly, which can carry in its tiny body as much destruction as can the latest type of bomb, writes Kenneth Morris in the Times. The destructive powers of the tsetse fly, in its capacity as the carrier of sleeping sickness alone, are dramatically brought out in the history of the Basoga tribe in Uganda at the beginning of the present century. Sleeping sickness was first discovered in the Protectorate in July, 1901, and by May of 1902 over 20,000 Basoga had died, and the disease was spreading rapidly. Bv 1905 deaths in the kingdom of Buganda alone totalled 92,544, and it was estimated that in all more than 200,000 persons had perished of the disease out of a population of about 300,000 living in the affected areas. Whole tracts of the shores or Victoria Nyanza had to be abandoned and their resettlement has been possible only within the last three or four years, and then under conditions of the strictest coutrol. For the tsetse is still lurking in the background.