The tsetse fly is a bloodsucking insect that kills more than three million livestock in sub-Saharan Africa every year with the nagana wasting disease, sickens and kills over 75,000 people with the sleeping sickness, and destroys over $4 billion each year in agriculture.

Tsetse are blood-feeding, fast-flying flies that transmit a range of Trypanosoma spp. protozoan pathogens, which cause sleeping sickness in humans and their nagana in their livestock.

The tsetse fly is best known as the vector for the trypanosome parasites that cause sleeping sickness and a disease in livestock called nagana.

The flies also carry nagana, which weakens or kills cattle and renders whole regions of Africa inhospitable to most livestock.

Someday, it may well be that Theileria, Nagana, and African Sleeping Sickness are no longer “just” an African problem.