“Sleeping sickness is a notorious disease — immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A single bite from a tsetse fly carrying the parasite is all it takes to infect someone. Without treatment one form of the illness can progress from mild symptoms to death in a matter of weeks.

Now, a new drug holds the promise of helping the World Health Organization meet its goal of eliminating the disease by 2030. A committee of the European Medicines Agency has given an important green light to the first single-dose treatment — a medication called acoziborole, which could be in use by early next year.

Acoziborole is especially notable because it is taken as three pills swallowed together in a single dose, replacing long-used earlier treatments that included intravenous drugs known to cause a ‘burning’ sensation in the veins as well as being fatal for nearly one in 20 patients. Even the current first-line oral treatment, fexinidazole, must be taken for 10 days and comes with severe side effects such as nausea, vomiting and heart-rhythm disturbances. By contrast, clinical trials of acoziborole found just one significant side effect: mild to moderate headache.

‘For decades, available treatments were difficult to use,’ says Dr. Gerardo Priotto, who leads the World Health Organization’s efforts against sleeping sickness and was not part of the new drug’s development team. Therapies required staff, equipment and reliable infrastructure, he says. ‘These challenges were especially severe in remote, rural areas, where most cases occur and health services are limited.’

The new drug, acoziborole, removes just about all of these barriers.”

From NPR.