Mortality.—Although spontaneous recovery may take place in the early stages of trypanosomiasis, when the disease has arrived at the stage of sleeping sickness death, it is believed, is inevitable. Corre has told us how native villages in Senegambia have been depopulated. What has occurred on the Congo, in Angola, and recently in Uganda, bears out this estimate of the gravity of the disease when it appears
Fig. 49.—Transverse section of vessel in the brain in a case of sleeping sickness. (From photo after Bettencourt.)
in epidemic form. We know that many islands on the Victoria Nyanza have been completely depopulated; and if it be true for a large part of the country, as Bruce has shown to be the case at Entebbe and its neighbourhood, namely, that 30 per cent. of the population harbour trypanosomes, the outlook for Uganda and neighbouring countries is grave indeed. The population of the implicated districts of Uganda, originally about 300,000, was reduced in six years to 100,000 by sleeping sickness.
