Eugene Jamot

Life & Legacy

Eugène Jamot (14 November 1879 – 24 April 1937) was a French military doctor in the colonial troops who played a major role in the prevention of sleeping sickness in Cameroon and other central African countries.
Jamot trained as a medical doctor at the University of Montpellier. In 1909, he enrolled at the Marseille School of Tropical Medicine and a year later, in 1910 he went to Cameroon with a French colonial hygiene group. They joined German scientists who had organised a Sleeping Sickness Treatment Research Group. Jamot discovered that the tsetse fly was the vector of the trypanosomes causing the disorder. By sending multiple public health intervention teams in villages, Jamot's team considerably reduced the incidence of trypanosomiasis, and thus, its transmission, in Cameroon and hence the disease.
Later Jamot was made director of the Pasteur Institute at Brazzaville.