Sleeping sickness is a bizarre and tortuous disease that has puzzled Scottish doctors for more than 200 years. Even the common cure can be deadly and contains arsenic.

Sleeping sickness is a bizarre and tortuous disease that has puzzled Scottish doctors for more than 200 years. Even the common cure can be deadly and contains arsenic.

David Livingstone, the Blantyre-born explorer, is thought to have been the first to record using the poison to treat the fatal African illness. Now researchers at Glasgow University have been given almost £500,000 to find a remedy which will claim fewer lives.

Professor Peter Kennedy, head of the university's neuroscience division, has published a book tracing the history of sleeping sickness, and the way the quest for a cure has woven through so many lives. He believes renewed efforts to tackle the illness, which kills around 50,000 people a year, could eliminate it within a decade.

"I think the time has come," he said. "In 10 years, this could all become something that marked history."

Sleeping sickness is a largely African disease, harboured in animals and transferred to humans by the painful bite of the tsetse fly. Symptoms in the early stages, such as aching joints and weight loss, are similar to that of other illnesses, including malaria.

However, as it progresses, patients find their body clock reverses, causing excessive sleepiness during the day and uncontrollable urges to sleep at any time or place, with insomnia at night. Other features include pain at the slightest touch and, towards the end, intolerable itching and seizures.

Without treatment, it is always fatal.

Professor Kennedy said: "If I got malaria I would not be very pleased, but if it got sleeping sickness I would be terrified. I dread being bitten by a tsetse fly."

A crucial problem, he said, is the type of drug most often given to patients in the later stages of the illness. Called melarsoprol, it is an arsenical treatment which can cause severe brain inflammation and kills one in 20 patients.

Professor Kennedy's team at Glasgow University is already testing compounds, with one combination producing some promising results.

The Medical Research Council is supporting the work with £479,000 funding.