A Saskatchewan entomologist is part of a United Nations campaign that uses nuclear technology to wipe out the tsetse fly in central Africa. It's the dreaded insect that spreads sleeping sickness to people and animals.

The tsetse fly is one of Africa's biggest killers. The insect carries trypanosome, a parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, a condition that attacks the nervous system and results in chronic fatigue and eventually, coma.

The illness has an 80 per cent death rate, killing more people in some parts of Africa than any other disease. There is no vaccine and drugs used to treat the sickness are highly toxic.

"We estimate there may be up to 300,000 to 500,0000 people who may die every year from this infection," says Dr. Jay Keystone of the Centre for Travel and Tropical Medicine.

The parasite also kills livestock by the millions, restricting the output of agriculture, while rendering vast areas of land off-limits.

"These areas become uninhabitable because the population knows that if they stay in those areas, they're at risk of dying from this dreadful disease," explains Keystone.

The fly's range has expanded over the years; one-third of the continent is now infested. But repeated attempts to wipe it out have failed -- that is, until recently.

On the east African island of Zanzibar, nuclear technology has virtually eliminated the housefly-sized insect. The process involves breeding male tsetse flies in a lab, and blasting them with radiation from a cobalt-60 source to sterilize them.

Hundreds of thousands of the flies are then dropped by plane. The sterilized flies eventually mate, but don't reproduce. Once a female tsetse fly mates with an infertile male, she stores the sperm in her abdomen and joins them with the five to eight eggs that she will produce over the course of her life time.

The man leading the campaign is a Canadian: Arnold Dyck, of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations agency. Dyck used a similar method of insect control with codling moths in apple and pear orchards. He's already been awarded the Order of Canada for his work.

"The sterile insects find the fertile insects on their own. So we think eradication is really feasible for the first time."

The fly has virtually been eliminated in Zanzibar. Now cows are living longer and milk production has tripled, local beef production has doubled and the number of farmers who fertilize crops with manure has multiplied five fold.

The Organization of African Unity is looking to expand that program to Ethiopia, Mali and Botswana. Making Africa tsetse free is a daunting undertaking, said John Kabayo, who's directing the program in Ethiopia.

"But there's a riddle in Africa that asks how you eat an elephant -- and the answer is in small pieces. This is how we will accomplish control of the tsetse, establishing first one fly-free area and then moving on to another."