The bite of the Tsetse Fly

It hurts, really bad. Tsetse Fly's are about one inch long. They don't like the bright sun, really only shade. They will bite pretty much any animal, but mostly cows and humans. Their bite is so strong, that they will chew through clothes.

My first, real encounter with these insects was in Sudan, at a place call Biem. We were planning on delivering about 8 tons of supplies the next day, and had arrived on a scouting mission. We flew in on an Antonov AN-28 from Loki. This is really only important because I remember the first bite vividly.

I had been standing in the sun, and it was hot. The equatorial sun would actually hurt my skin. So to escape from the heat I walked under the tail of the AN-28. I was looking for shade. What I got was a sharp bite to the back of my neck. I slapped at the bite thinking more of "shooing" away the insect. Only when I hit it I found it to be rather large. It turns out to be a Tsetse fly.

I didn't know much about them at the time. So I vainly tried to stay in the shade, only to be slapping at them constantly. So many bit me, and so hard, that my wife ended up throwing out my shirt. It had that many holes in it!

Later I found out much more about the fly, and its notoriety. It carries the African Sleeping Sickness. A horrible disease, which kills many African's each year. It's called the sleeping sickness, because you will progressively loose your strength over the period of about 1 year. Sleeping longer and longer each day. Finally, you will enter a coma and die.

There is only one way to treat the sickness. You need to take just slightly less than lethal doses of poison. The idea is the poison used is slightly more toxic to the parasite than it is to the human host. Hopefully the parasites dies before the human does.

The CDC told me that about 1 in 100 Tsetse fly's is a carrier in that part of Sudan. I must have been very lucky, I'm sure I was bitten by that many flies and more the next day. For whatever reason though, the odds worked in my favor on those trips.

Those two trips the one that day and another one the next day, were perhaps the most dangerous trips I ever made. I thought the danger was coming from the civil war. I had no idea that I was in even more danger from some flies.