teach about sleeping sickness and stars a giant fly : Goats and Soda

Don’t worry, this six-foot-tall tsetse fly didn’t bite anyone. He was part of a performance to teach Malawians about preventing sleeping sickness.

Hannah Bialic

The first time Nicola Veitch went to a soccer game, she danced on the field in a white lab coat alongside a colleague inside a giant tsetse fly costume. Most of the fans applauded. Some were baffled.

Neither was auditioning to be the new team mascot.

Rather, Veitch, who’s a lecturer in parasitology at the University of Glasgow, put on this somewhat weird performance as a pilot for sleeping sickness street theater — using a theatrical event to teach people about a disease that affects about 1,000 people each year in Africa.

In Malawi’s two endemic districts where the disease is spread by local tsetse flies, the number of people falling ill from sleeping sickness has declined in recent years, but cases still persist. Last year, there were only 40 cases across the country. But Veitch points out the disease is “often unpredictable,” which means that the possibility of resurgence remains a persistent threat.

More than a year after that Scottish match, the group brought the theatrical event to soccer games in Malawi where people cheered while learning about how to protect themselves from this tiny killer. Veitch calls it an innovative intervention in remote, hard-to-reach communities with few smartphones.

At the time of the performance, she says a clinical trial was underway for a new drug that “seems to be very promising in terms of treating sleeping…