Sleeping Sickness Can Drive You Mad. But Treatment Is Now Easier Than Ever

By the time the infection had invaded Ange Bukabau's central nervous system and begun to affect her brain, her family didn't know what to do with her. She was acting erratic, out of control.

"I was going crazy," says Bukabau, 32, who makes her living as a vendor in a small town in Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 200 miles east of the capital, Kinshasa.

Her family members were frightened — and convinced it was witchcraft. Maybe she had sought a charm to attract a rich man and ended up cursed. "They worried I was a danger to my children, so they took them both away," she recalls. "I was alone."

What neither she nor her family nor the nurse she had seen had realized was that she had contracted African sleeping sickness — a parasitic disease that, if left untreated, essentially drives people mad before killing them. Happily, Bukabau made it to a hospital just in time and was one of the first patients to be treated with fexinidazole, the first treatment for sleeping sickness that relies on pills alone. On Friday, it earned approval from Europe's drug regulatory agency, paving the way for its use in DRC and across east, central and southern Africa, where the disease occurs, by mid-2019.