Treatment for acute sleeping sickness has been brutal — until now

Acute sleeping sickness – the treatment is almost as horrific as the disease.

But now there is encouraging news about an oral medication – one that's also been used for chronic sleeping sickness to great success.

Symptoms for both forms of sleeping sickness start with fever and aches. Then things get worse. The parasite that causes the disease will start to disrupt sleeping patterns and cause aggressiveness and psychosis – that's how it got its name.

For many years, therapy for both types would begin with a lumbar puncture to see if the parasite has invaded the central nervous systemfollowed by intravenous injections of a drug toxic to the kidneys and an arsenic-based drug that's toxic would die from the treatment alone. But left untreated, the acute form of sleeping sickness is almost always fatal.