tsetse

n.

(Zoöl.) A venomous two-winged African fly (Glossina morsitans) whose bite is very poisonous, and even fatal, to horses and cattle, but harmless to men. It renders extensive districts in which it abounds uninhabitable during certain seasons of the year. [Written also tzetze, and tsetze.]

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from Tswana
This word originated in Botswana

One of the smaller creatures on the African continent is one of its bigger problems. By virtue of its harmfulness, the tsetse fly came to the attention of English speakers as early as 1849, when an Englishman in South Africa wrote of horses "killed either by lions or horse sickness, and the fly called tzetse." The tsetse likes blood. Some species of tsetse go for the blood of hoofed animals, others for the blood of humans. By carrying blood from one victim to the next, the fly spreads deadly parasitical diseases. To cattle it gives nagana, also called tsetse disease; to humans it gives trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness.

If you have sleeping sickness, you begin with something that feels like the flu and end up with parasites swelling your brain and causing bizarre changes in behavior before you lapse into apathy, a coma, and death. Vast areas of sub-Saharan Africa remain undeveloped because the tsetse keeps humans and their cattle away.

There are treatments, if not cures, for sleeping sickness, but they are expensive. Difluoromethylornithine or DFMO prevents the parasitical trypanosomes from multiplying, at a cost of $400 per person, far more than most African states can afford. Efforts to control the flies themselves have so far been unsuccessful, though research is being done to find environmentally benign natural controls.

The Tswana language, which is closely related to Sotho, belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family. It is the national language of Botswana in southern Africa, where it has more than a million speakers, and it is also spoken by nearly three million people in South Africa. No other words from Tswana have immigrated into the general vocabulary of English.

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IN BRIEF: n. - Bloodsucking African fly.