New face of sleeping sickness epidemiology highlights need for new tools
Recent developments have rekindled hopes of eliminating human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), more familiarly known as sleeping sickness, as a public health problem in those areas of sub-Saharan Africa where the disease is endemic. In the February 2011 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, Simarro and colleagues at the WHO report in 'The Human African Trypanosomiasis Control and Surveillance Programme of the World Health Organisation 2000-2009: The Way Forward' that new cases of sleeping sickness fell below the symbolic number of 10,000 in 2009, setting the stage for a possible elimination of sleeping sickness in sub-Saharan Africa - a prospect that was unthinkable a decade ago. In order to highlight the existing literature that PLoS NTDs authors have contributed to the field, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases Deputy Editor-in-Chief Serap Aksoy has compiled a collection of articles on HAT with a specific emphasis on potential applications for disease control...