How to Use sleeping sickness in a Sentence

sleeping sickness

noun
  • The tsetse fly, which spreads sleeping sickness, nourishes its grub inside a bizarrely mammalian uterus and feeds it with a milklike fluid—one that’s laden with microbes.
    — Ed Yong, The Atlantic, 12 Dec. 2017
  • In years past, African sleeping sickness was responsible for killing as many as half a million people every year by some estimates.
    — Bill Heavey, Field & Stream, 19 Oct. 2020
  • There are two types of sleeping sickness, each named after the region of Africa where it was historically found; both progress through two distinct stages.
    — Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Mar. 2026
  • There are different theories for the appearance of sleeping sickness in East Africa.
    — Carey Baraka, Quartz Africa, 26 Apr. 2020
  • The discovery opens the door to future treatments for sleeping sickness, a disease that continues to have a devastating impact.
    — Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Mar. 2026
  • In Africa, those who have two specific variants of the gene gain some protection against sleeping sickness, which is caused by an environmental parasite.
    — Jeff Wheelwright, Discover Magazine, 7 Oct. 2016
  • Much of the progress toward eliminating sleeping sickness rests on the work of African researchers and patients who took part in the trials, despite difficult conditions.
    — Fran Kritz, NPR, 16 Mar. 2026
  • The chemical has been used as a drug to treat African sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease transmitted by the tsetse fly found only in sub-Saharan Africa.
    — Miriam Fauzia, USA TODAY, 15 June 2021
  • Take, for example, African sleeping sickness, a deadly disease with frightening neuro-psychiatric symptoms.
    — Nathalie Strub-Wourgaft, STAT, 24 Nov. 2020
  • Tsetse flies spread the parasitic infection that causes African sleeping sickness, a disease that is 100 percent fatal without treatment.
    — Bill Heavey, Field & Stream, 5 Aug. 2020
  • Disease-specific commentary expanded to address other conditions, such as sleeping sickness and smallpox.
    — Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science | AAAS, 13 July 2021
  • These crippling and even fatal diseases include African sleeping sickness, a brain-eating amoeba, hookworm, roundworms that infiltrate the lymphatic system, and malaria.
    — Bradley J. Fikes, sandiegouniontribune.com, 4 July 2018
  • Despite the side effects, DEET is still one of the best lines of defense against not just ants but mosquitoes, which transmit deadly diseases like dengue fever, malaria, and sleeping sickness.
    — Kyle Frischkorn, Smithsonian, 11 July 2017
  • Transmitted by the tsetse fly, sleeping sickness is endemic in 36 sub-Saharan African countries and is almost always fatal if untreated.
    — Allessandra Dicorato, STAT, 21 Nov. 2022
  • Between 1917 and the late nineteen-twenties, about a million people worldwide came down with a mysterious sleeping sickness called encephalitis lethargica.
    — Katherine S. Xue, The New Yorker, 21 Feb. 2021
  • Over the years, hundreds of thousands have died from sleeping sickness, but sustained efforts — tsetse fly control, diagnostic testing and medical treatment — have drastically reduced the incidence.
    — Fran Kritz, NPR, 16 Mar. 2026
  • Working with the same researchers who first identified the condition, Every Cure found that a drug developed decades ago for African sleeping sickness appears to inhibit the protein that drives the disease.
    — Brad Quick, CNBC, 27 Mar. 2026
  • The century-old suramin, currently used to treat African sleeping sickness and river blindness (onchocerciasis), has also gotten some traction as a potential Covid-19 treatment.
    — Joshua Cohen, Forbes, 1 Jan. 2022
  • Another example is the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes the disease African trypanosomiasis, commonly known as sleeping sickness.
    — Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, 5 Dec. 2022
  • And in 2020, the World Health Organization hopes to eliminate sleeping sickness, or African trypanosomiasis, as a public health problem.
    — Davide Castelvecchi, Scientific American, 30 Dec. 2019
  • Scientists have unraveled a 40‑year‑old mystery at the heart of sleeping sickness, uncovering how a deadly parasite behind the life-threatening disease repeatedly slips past the human immune system and survives long enough to cause serious illness.
    — Melissa Fleur Afshar, MSNBC Newsweek, 30 Mar. 2026
  • Some can be downright dangerous, transmitting viruses (yellow fever, encephalitis, dengue fever, West Nile disease), bacteria (Lyme disease, typhus) or parasites (malaria, sleeping sickness).
    — Washington Post, 6 Aug. 2019
  • Monica Mungier, who studies sleeping sickness at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health but was not involved with development of the new drug, says that the parasite can sometimes evade detection.
    — Fran Kritz, NPR, 16 Mar. 2026
  • Native to tropical Africa, these big, biting flies spread the parasitic infection that causes African sleeping sickness, a disease that is 100 percent fatal without treatment, and the treatment itself is notoriously difficult.
    — Bill Heavey, Field & Stream, 19 Oct. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'sleeping sickness.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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