page_title: Frederick Percival Mackie
section_title: Royal Society Sleeping Sickness Commission
hierarchical_section_title: Frederick Percival Mackie / Personal life and career / Royal Society Sleeping Sickness Commission
caption_attribution_description: English: L-R Percival Mackie, Lady Bruce, Sir David Bruce, H.R. Bateman, Albert Ernest Hamerton (RAMC). Photo courtesy of Peter and Joanna Mackie
context_page_description: Colonel Frederick Percival Mackie CSI, OBE, KHS, FRCP, FRCS was an English physician who was in the Indian Medical Service between 1901 and 1931 working on the incidence, transmission, and pathology of insect-borne tropical diseases. He discovered the vectors for relapsing fever and kala-azar. He had important administrative responsibilities in Iraq during the First World War and emerged as a leading figure in Indian medical science, public health, and tropical hygiene between the wars as director of the Haffkine Institute in Bombay.
context_section_description: A pressing issue at the time was the possibility of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) spreading to India via similar blood-sucking insect vectors. In September 1908, at the request of the Indian Government, Captain Mackie was attached to the Royal Society’s Sleeping Sickness Commission headed by Sir David Bruce F.R.S. Based at Mpumo, Uganda. Mackie was one of Bruce's youthful “Three Musketeers,” the others being Captains H.R. Bateman and Albert Ernest Hamerton. The accompanying photo shows (L to R) Mackie, Lady Bruce, Bruce, Bateman and Hamerton at their lab in Uganda, 1908. The work in Africa represented a huge step forward in the understanding of trypanosome-related diseases not only in humans (using monkeys as models) but in domestic cattle and wild animals, including elephants. Some 17 publications arose from this work in which Mackie was a co-author. Of the many species of Trypanosoma studied only T. gambiense (now T. brucei gambiense) causes sleeping sickness in humans. The disease is spread by blood sucking insects of the genus Glossina, which include tse-tse flies. The researchers studied the length of time tse-tse flies retained the parasite, how long it took to mature, how long the flies remained capable of transmitting the infection, what proportion of flies were infected, how many were required to cause sickness, whether transmission could occur "mechanically" by surface contact of the fly's mouthparts, and many other aspects. In a critical series of experiments it was found that the flies remained infective for up to 75 days after becoming infected themselves and that a tiny drop of fluid taken from the gut of the 75-day-old fly injected under the skin of a monkey gave rise to sleeping sickness after an incubation period of eight days. The Commission's work served to reassure the Indian Government that there was no risk of sleeping sickness spreading to India as it was clear that only Glossina could carry the infection and no species of this genus were native to India.
caption: L-R Percival Mackie, Lady Bruce, Sir David Bruce, H. R. Bateman, A. E. Hamerton. Photo courtesy of Peter and Joanna Mackie
exif: {}