Sleeping Sickness Commission

[2] The initial team in 1902 consisted of Aldo Castellani and George Carmichael Low, both from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Cuthbert Christy, a medical officer on duty in Bombay, India.

[4] The commission established that species of blood protozoan called Trypanosoma brucei, named after Bruce, was the causative parasite of sleeping sickness.

Atkins described the neurological symptoms, meaning the late stages of infection, among the natives of Guinea referring to the cause of deaths as "sleepy distemper.

"[8] In 1803, another English physician Thomas Winterbottom gave more elaborate symptoms including the different pathological disorders due to the infection in Sierra Leone.

[9] An important diagnosis recorded by Winterbottom was swollen posterior cervical lymph nodes that were visible since the early stage of infection.

Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone was the first to suggest that sleeping sickness in animals was transmitted by the bite of tsetse fly.

[18] Scottish physician David Bruce, while working in the Royal Army Medical Corps stationed at Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa, was assigned to investigate nagana which severely struck cattle and horses in Zululand.

On 27 October 1894, he and his wife Mary Elizabeth Bruce (née Steele), who was also a microbiologist, moved to Ubombo Hill, where the disease was most prevalent.

It was the discovery of Trypanosoma brucei,[20] the name created by Henry George Plimmer and John Rose Bradford in 1899 in honour of the discoverer.

[21] The genus Trypanosoma was created by Hungarian physician David Gruby in his description of T. sanguinis, a species he discovered from the blood of frogs in 1843.

British Colonial Surgeon Robert Michael Forde examined the blood samples and identified some organisms which he attributed as parasitic worms.

Forde described the causative infection as "very many actively moving worm-like bodies whose nature he was unable to ascertain" from his original diagnosis to Dutton.

Dutton prepared several blood smears from which he concluded that the parasites were protozoans belonging to the genus Trypanosoma, yet distinct in structure and disease it caused from those of known species at the time.

At that time there was an international debate on the etiology of sleeping sickness with many favouring a contagious nature since the infection was spreading fast.

There were frictions between the team members, and Christy, who was regarded as playing only a minor role, resorted to idling his time trekking and hunting.

"[13] Low, whose character was described as "truculent and prone to take offence," was soon dejected by the fact that filaria was not prevalent among the people with sleeping sickness, left Africa in October 1902, never to return.