Eugène Jamot

Who was Eugène Jamot?

Eugène Jamot was a French physician who played a major role in the prevention of sleeping sickness in Cameroun and other African countries.

He was born in the hamlet of La Borie, part of the commune of Saint-Sulpice-les-Champs, in the Creuse département of central France. Jamot trained as a medical doctor at the University of Montpellier. In 1909, he enrolled at the Marseilles 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 Cameroun and hence the disease.

Later Jamot was made director of the Pasteur Institute at Brazzaville. He died on the 7th April 1937, in the village of Sardent, Creuse.