Nodding acquaintance

AFRICA is home to so many premier-league diseases (such as AIDS, childhood diarrhoea, malaria and tuberculosis) that those in lower divisions are easily ignored. But these neglected illnesses cause suffering and death, and more subtly, when they affect children, eat away at a country’s potential by reducing the human capital of its rising generation. Konzo and nodding syndrome are two particularly nasty members of this class. Both are neurological. And both do affect mainly children. But they are now yielding to investigation, and with it the possibility of prevention—though sadly not cure for those already afflicted.