Medicine: Sic

General Adolphe Eugene Marie Sicé (pronounced See-say), High Commissioner of Free French Africa, stopped off in Manhattan on his way to London last week and received encomiums on his stout work in freeing French Equatorial Africa from the rule of Vichy. Earlier stout work by the General was not so much in the news. But it was flies—specifically the tsetse fly—from which General Sicé had first set his black people free.

Tall, rugged General Sicé, a doctor before he was a soldier, was for many years head of the Pasteur Institute at Brazzaville. Public Enemy No. 1 when General Sicé took up his duties was the deadly tsetse fly, which carries the parasites causing African sleeping sickness.

The tsetse looks something like an ordinary housefly, but has the sharp proboscis and the bloodthirsty habits of a mosquito. When an infected tsetse bites a man, it injects into his bloodstream protozoa known as trypanosomes, which—for the tsetse is omnivampiverous—it may have picked up from the blood of alligators, hippopotamuses, hartebeests, etc. This parasite invades the human lymph stream, the spleen, finally the brain. At first, tsetse victims become feverish, develop swollen lymph glands. Gradually they fall into a deep slumber, grow delirious as the trypanosomes attack the nervous system and brain. Many of these sleeping sick men live for years before they waste away and die.

There is no vaccine against sleeping sickness, but the powerful arsenic drug tryparsamide, which kills syphilis spirochetes, also kills the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. Developed in the Rockefeller Institute in 1919, and introduced to Africa by Dr. Louise Pearce in the ’20s, tryparsamide clears up sleeping sickness in three to six months when injected twice a week. General Sicé’s biggest job was persuading the natives to take the treatment. He also organized fly-killing squads. With this curative and preventive program, in 17 years General Sicé brought down the sleeping-sickness toll from 2,000,000 victims, or about 80% of the native population in one-third of French Equatorial Africa, to less than 1%.

When France fell to the Nazis, the Pasteur Institute’s Sicé found new public enemies to fight. He planned a successful uprising against the Vichyites entrenched in Middle Congo. When the Governor General refused to go along with the Free French, General Sicé and aides wrapped him in a blanket, threw him in a truck, dumped him over the border into the Belgian Congo.