170 x 123 mm. Showing sleeping sickness victims seated in a village clearing. Sleeping sickness reached epidemic proportions in Uganda in the early years of the century, and in May 1902 Colonel (later, Sir) James Sadler reported that 20,000 people had died in Busoga alone. In 1902 a Royal Society Commission consisting of Drs. Low, Christy and Castellani arrived to investigate the problem and in 1903 Colonel (later, Sir) David Bruce discovered that the tsetse fly was the source of transmission of the disease. Further investigations confirmed that the tsetse fly flourished only in shady land near water but the cost of clearing the land along the shores of lake Victoria was regarded as prohibitive and Bell on his own initiative instituted in November 1906 a policy of evacuating the lakeside community and setting up medical camps for sleeping sickness sufferers. The Colonial Office sanctioned these steps in 1907 and by 1909 the scourge, which between 1898 and 1906 had killed over 200,000 people, was largely defeated.