The International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization of African Unity are working together on an interesting effort to eradicate the tsetse fly from Africa. Like mosquitoes, the tsetse fly feeds on the blood of humans and animals and in the process spread sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis).
Anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 people are afflicted with sleeping sickness every year, and the disease ends up killing 4 out of 5 of those who contract it.
It is not that there is no treatment for sleeping sickness, but rather that it is relatively expensive. A full regimen of drugs for the disease costs about $1,000 — an enormous amount in African countries where the per capita income is often far below that amount.
Moreover, the prevalence of sleeping sickness in Africa has been gradually increasing. The BBC reports that some estimates put the cost of the disease in excess of $4 billion, including an estimated three million cattle killed every year by the disease.
The International Atomic Energy Agency hopes to take advantage of the mating habits of the tsetse fly to eradicate it from Africa. Female tsetse flies normally only mate once in their lifetime. Once they mate with a male, they will not usually attempt to mate again.
So the plan is to sterilize male flies using radiation and then release the sterile males into the wild. When a sterile male mates with a female, that female will produce no offspring throughout her short life. Gradually, the number of tsetse flies should begin to decline, and eventually it might be possible to eradicate the tsetse fly entirely from sub-Saharan Africa.
The validity of this approach has already been demonstrated on the island of Zanzibar. In 1994, in cooperation with the Tanzanian government, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency began a program of releasing sterilized male tsetse flies into the environment. In 1997 an independent monitoring group confirmed that not a single tsetse fly had been found in over a year in the areas where the fly population had been the heaviest only a few years earlier. The FAO and IAEA succeeded in eradicating the fly, and since the island is too far from the mainland of Africa for the insect to fly, it will remain tsetse-fly free unless the fly is accidentally reintroduced on shipments from mainland Africa.
Of course that will be a moot point if researchers succeed in eradicating the fly from all of Africa. The campaign will initially introduce large numbers of sterile male flies in areas where the insect is pervasive, such as Botswana and parts of Ethiopia, and then gradually spread out across all of Africa.
Source:
New drive to root out deadly fly. Ania Lichtarowiz, The BBC, February 18, 2002.
Battling the deadly bite of the tsetse fly. CNN, February 28, 1998.
Tsetse fly eradicated on the Island of Zanzibar. Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, May 5, 1998.
Campaign Launched to Eliminate Tsetse Fly, Which Has Turned Much of Africa Into a Green Desert. International Atomic Energy Agency, Press Release. February 2, 2002.
My friend on Orkut shared this link with me and I’m not dissapointed that I came to your blog.
I wish you the best. I am the sole proprietor of a chemical compound that will perform the same function, eradication, but less expensive and it answers all the environmental issues at hand. My compound will eradicate all vectors, not just the tsetse fly. It may also have agricultural benefits. Have a nice day. God Bless.
Norm