Tsetse Fly

(Jrt)

Tsetse Fly
Tsetse flies or glossines are a kind of African and vector flies by their bites sleeping sickness caused by the parasite Trypanosoma gambiense.

The word tsetse comes from the Tswana language, spoken in several countries in Southern Africa and means "fly that kills livestock".

Classification
The tsetse fly belongs to the genus Glossina, which is the only one in the family Glossinidae. It is a generic term which includes species of the genus Glossina such as Glossina pallidipes, Glossina brevipalpis or Glossina austeni.

The name of the genre is attributed to the German Christian entomologist Rudolph Wilhelm Wiedemann (1770-1840) who named the species type in 1830.

Trypanosome
It is through the bite of tsetse flies that can transmit the trypanosome which can cause human sleeping sickness, which causes in Africa, the death of 400 000 persons per year. No vaccine exists to this day (March 2007).

The parasite also affects cattle, making it sluggish and increasingly unfit for agricultural use. This causes a loss of 4 billion dollars for the African continent according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Wrestling and eradication
The first way to fight against the tsetse fly is the use of insecticide. But in recent years, a technique aimed at making sterile males has yielded very good results to completely eradicate the insect.

The sterile insect technique is to produce a large quantity of males and sterilize by subjecting them to radiation. These insects are then released into the wild and will mate with wild females. If the proportion of male sterile males on the wild is large enough, an order of magnitude less than 10, 1 being addressed, the species is quickly eradicated.

This technique was used on the island of Zanzibar from 1994 to 1998, where in four years, no more tsetse fly has been detected. The eradication programme, conducted in cooperation between FAO and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been as a first step to drastically reduce the population of tsetse flies with insecticide, To enable the sterile insect technique to be effective, it was only after that sterile male flies were released. A report of 50 per 1 was used on Zanzibar, to ensure the success of the operation.

Since the success of Zanzibar, FAO wants to expand the use of this technique to other African countries.

Opponents of the project argue that the abolition of this species could disrupt the ecosystem, where tsetse flies without a doubt its place. A major programme to eradicate the tsetse fly has already been applied in the years 1970-1980 in the region of Ngaoundere. A continuation of this program in early 1990 was to use traps insects so as to constitute a natural barrier to the spread of the insect in the area regarded as eradicated. This initiative has enabled a start of development of milk production resulting with her a slowdown in migration of livestock and a beginning of the forage on the plateau of Adamawa.


Species Glossines
The kind of tsetse flies is generally divided into three main groups based on a combination of distribution, habitat and morphological characters. The genre included

* The flies savannes: (Sub-type Morsitans appointed Glossina):
o austeni Glossina (Newstead, 1912)
o Glossina longipalpis (Wiedemann, 1830)
o Glossina morsitans centralis (Machado, 1970)
o Glossina morsitans morsitans (Wiedemann, 1850)
o Glossina morsitans submorsitans (Newstead, 1911)
o Glossina pallidipes (Austen, 1903)
o Glossina swynnertoni (Austen, 1923)



* The flies forests: (Sub-type Fusca, appointed Austenia):
o Glossina brevipalpis (Newstead, 1911)
o Glossina fusca congolensis (Evans and Newstead, 1921)
o Glossina fusca fusca (Walker, 1849)
o Glossina fuscipleuris (Austen, 1911)
o Glossina frezili (Gouteux, 1987)
o Glossina haningtoni (Newstead and Evans, 1922)
o Glossina longipennis (Corti, 1895)
o Glossina medicorum (Austen, 1911)
o Glossina nashi (Potts, 1955)
o Glossina nigrofusca hopkinsi (Van Emden, 1944)
o nigrofusca nigrofusca Glossina (Newstead, 1911)
o Glossina severini (Newstead, 1913)
o Glossina schwetzi (Newstead and Evans, 1921)
o Glossina tabaniformis (Westwood, 1850)
o Glossina vanhoofi (Henrard, 1952)



* The flies Riparian: (Sub-type Palpalis appointed Nemorhina):
o Glossina caliginea (Austen, 1911)
o Glossina fuscipes fuscipes (Newstead, 1911)
o Glossina fuscipes martinii (Zumpt, 1935)
o Glossina fuscipes quanzensis (Pires, 1948)
o Glossina pallicera pallicera (Bigot, 1891)
o Glossina pallicera newsteadi (Austen, 1929)
o Glossina palpalis palpalis (Robineau-Desvoidy, 1830)
o Glossina palpalis gambiensis (Vanderplank, 1911)
o Glossina tachinoides (Westwood, 1850)


Read also Bee

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