![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
01-11-2021, 08:00 AM
The Parasite of Sleep
In the villages of sub-Saharan Africa and the wilds of the Amazon, the tiniest insect can bring a sleep that leads to death. The tsetse fly loves the taste of human blood, and it often carries a parasite known as Trypanosoma, whose tastes run more toward human brains.
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As they mature, the parasites cross the blood-brain barrier and the encephalitic stage begins. The Trypanosoma alter the structure and function of their hosts’ brain cells (the parasites seem have a particular penchant for the hypothalamus, which helps regulate our mood and sleep/wake cycles) and the hosts start to feel and behave strangely. First they suffer headaches and have trouble sleeping, or sleep and wake at odd hours, due to the parasite’s alteration of the rhythm in which the sleep hormone melatonin gets released.
Before long, though, human hosts start to exhibit a dizzying variety of other psychological symptoms, from changing appetites to depression to odd speech patterns to uncontrollable itching and tremors. Over the next few years, the host’s odd behavior gradually starts to lapse into laziness, unresponsiveness, and finally a prolonged sleep that leads to coma and death, hence the name “sleeping sickness.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-...man-brains
In the villages of sub-Saharan Africa and the wilds of the Amazon, the tiniest insect can bring a sleep that leads to death. The tsetse fly loves the taste of human blood, and it often carries a parasite known as Trypanosoma, whose tastes run more toward human brains.
......
As they mature, the parasites cross the blood-brain barrier and the encephalitic stage begins. The Trypanosoma alter the structure and function of their hosts’ brain cells (the parasites seem have a particular penchant for the hypothalamus, which helps regulate our mood and sleep/wake cycles) and the hosts start to feel and behave strangely. First they suffer headaches and have trouble sleeping, or sleep and wake at odd hours, due to the parasite’s alteration of the rhythm in which the sleep hormone melatonin gets released.
Before long, though, human hosts start to exhibit a dizzying variety of other psychological symptoms, from changing appetites to depression to odd speech patterns to uncontrollable itching and tremors. Over the next few years, the host’s odd behavior gradually starts to lapse into laziness, unresponsiveness, and finally a prolonged sleep that leads to coma and death, hence the name “sleeping sickness.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-...man-brains
