Joseph Everett Dutton (9 September 1874 – 27 February 1905) was a British parasitologist who discovered one of the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness.

[3] On 10 May 1901 the colonial surgeon at the hospital in Bathurst showed him a blood sample from a government employee with "very many actively moving worm-like bodies whose nature he was unable to ascertain".

[6] In September 1902 he returned to the Gambia with John Lancelot Todd, on an expedition which was supported by Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, which facilitated a prolonged visit to French Senegal.

[4][7] The twelfth expedition of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine left for the Congo Free State on 13 September 1903.

Christy went back to England in June 1904, while Todd and Dutton went upstream to Stanley Falls, which they reached late in 1904.

[8] Dutton found that the monkeys could be infected by bites from soft ticks (Ornithodoros moubata) carrying Borrelia duttoni, a spirochaete.

He also found that the parasite could pass into the eggs and larvae of the ticks, so the next generation would also be vehicles for infection.