Annual report of the Medical Department / Uganda Protectorate.

  • Uganda Protectorate. Medical Department
Date:
[1952]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Annual report of the Medical Department / Uganda Protectorate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hospitals outside their own home areas. By house-to-house visits it has been possible to bring to light cases missed at routine surveys, ‘and more patients have reported voluntarily since treatment has been arranged at the local dispensaries. A few diagnoses have been made on clinical grounds only, trypano¬ somes not having been found either in blood, glands or cerebrospinal fluid. Three cases were reported from Lango District, ten cases with one death from Acholi District, and six cases with one death from the West Nile District. Buvuma Island, which has been an endemic focus of rhodesiense infection since 1943, produced only two cases during the year, although one other case from Ngogwe on the mainland may have been infected from illicit fishing and landing in the closed area (6 cases in 1951, 25 in 1950). The measures adopted to prevent infection—voluntary evacuation and closure of the fly areas—cannot be credited with this fall; voluntary evacua¬ tion amounted to only 11% of the total population (1,200) during the past three years, and has now practically ceased; while attempts to consolidate the population and enforce “quarantine” measures have not been successful. Recession of tsetse fly during recent years has been noted both on Buvuma Island and on the mainland in the Eastern Province. In the Eastern Prov¬ ince, three cases were reported from Busoga District and twelve from Mbale District in the region around Mjanji Port. Of these latter cases, six were residents of Busoga and two of Kenya. In three cases infection was suspected to have occurred on islands near Buvuma. The regular monthly examination of blood slides is probably the most effective measure for detecting early cases. The efforts of the Sleeping Sickness Inspector to secure a local understanding of the way in which all departments are working for the welfare of the inhabitants of Buvuma Island should help to modify their suspicious attitude towards proposals designed to help in solving their problem. One difficult feature of the present situation is the tendency of the infection to occur sporadically. An area may be free from known cases of the disease for a matter of years, and then new cases infected locally will turn up. In Bunyoro, 20 cases were discovered in the Victoria Nile area in 1944; nothing more was heard until a singleton case was discovered in 1948; the next episode was the discovery of three early cases, one a child of 5 years old, in the opening months of 1953. Busongora, on the southern foothills of Ruwenzori, provides the same picture—two cases w7ere found in January, 1951, and no more for over two years. Such happenings in the past led to the view that the infection was being maintained in animal reservoirs, such as monkeys, crocodiles or sitatunga antelopes; latent and unsuspected infections in human beings can also be responsible. Typhus 123 patients suffering from typhus fever were treated in hospital (114 in 1951), the numbers of Europeans (21) and Asians (3) being slightly
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