The number of reported cases of sleeping sickness has fallen sharply over the last two decades, from almost 40,000 reported cases in 1998 to less than 1,000 per year over the past five years. This remarkable progress has been driven by both the fierce commitment of frontline health staff and the availability of safer, more effective treatments. But as cases decline, awareness of the disease can wane as well – making the sustained elimination of sleeping sickness a real challenge.

In parallel with our sleeping sickness R&D programmes in the DRC and Guinea, DNDi teams and partners are also squarely focused on supporting interventions to boost and maintain access to screening and treatment. Fexinidazole, the first simple, oral treatment for both stages of T.b. gambiense sleeping sickness, delivered by DNDi and partners in 2018, is now authorized for use in all endemic countries. A majority of eligible patients received the treatment in 2022 – provided free of charge.

To safeguard progress against sleeping sickness, we continued supporting patient screening and clinical training programmes for healthcare staff in 2022 together with our partners in the HAT Platform – and published an ethnographic study to inform and tailor interventions to ensure rapid case detection and treatment and increase community awareness of the disease. Our teams and partners also began work to improve routine pharmacovigilance reporting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Guinea, Angola, and South Sudan.