Sleeping sickness in Uganda: revisiting current and historical distributions.

Background: Sleeping sickness is a parasitic, vector-borne disease, carried by the tsetse fly and prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease continues to pose a public health burden in Uganda, which experienced a widespread outbreak in 1900-1920, and a more recent outbreak in 1976-1989. The disease continues to spread to uninfected districts.

Quality of parental consent in a Ugandan malaria study.

Objectives: We surveyed Ugandan parents who enrolled their children in a randomized pediatric malaria treatment trial to evaluate the parents' levels of understanding about the treatment trial and the quality of the parents' consents to allow their children to participate in the study.

Methods: We conducted 347 interviews immediately following enrollment at 4 Ugandan sites.

Results: A majority (78%) of the parents, most of whom where mothers (86%) had at most a primary school education.

Short-course eflornithine in Gambian trypanosomiasis: a multicentre randomized controlled trial.

Objective: A randomized controlled trial was conducted to determine whether 7 days of intravenous eflornithine (100 mg/kg every 6 h) was as effective as the standard 14-day regimen in the treatment of late-stage Trypanosoma brucei gambiense trypanosomiasis.

Methods: A total of 321 patients (274 new cases, 47 relapsing cases) were randomized at four participating centres in Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda to one of these treatment regimens and followed up for 2 years.

Results: Six patients died during treatment, one of whom was on the 7-day regimen, whereas the other five had been on the 14-day regimen (P = 0.

Risk factors for treatment failure after melarsoprol for Trypanosoma brucei gambiense trypanosomiasis in Uganda.

We evaluated the treatment failure rate among late-stage human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) patients treated with melarsoprol in Arua, northern Uganda, between September 1995 and August 1996, and identified the risk factors for treatment failure. We conducted a retrospective cohort study in October 1998, and performed a survival analysis. A treatment failure was defined as a late-stage HAT patient fully treated with melarsoprol and classified as an HAT case at any follow-up visit within 2 years after treatment.