Livestock farmers in Uganda's Kaberamaido and Soroti districts have been cautioned against Lantana camara, a shrub that grows wild in the region and is believed to be a breeding place for tsetse flies.
The head of the vector control programme at the ministry of health, Dr. Abbas Kakembo, warned that unless farmers destroyed the shrub by cutting down or burning it, their agricultural production efforts were at stake. This is because the deadly vector which transmits germs that cause nagana in livestock and sleeping sickness in humans hides in the shrub.
The shrub grows best during the rainy season and this is the same time when the tsetse flies are rampant. It has for a long time been considered an ornamental shrub used by rural peasants as a toothbrush, until recently when the scarcity of trees in Kumi and Tororo hit hard, causing people to resort to using it as a major source of firewood for preparing light foodstuffs.
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