once stated that I have not the slightest belief in the notion popularly prevalent up to the present that the Fly causes the disease by the injection of a poison elaborated by itself, after the manner of the leech, which injects a fluid to prevent the coagulation of the blood, or the snake for the purpose of procuring its prey or for defence, but that at most the Tsetse acts as a carrier of a living virus, an infinitely small parasite, from one animal to another, which entering into the blood stream of the animal bitten or pricked, there propagates and so gives rise to the disease.Henry George Plimmer and John Rose Bradford gave the full description of the new parasite in 1899 as Trypanosoma brucei, the name after the discoverer. The Sleeping Sickness Commission There was an outbreak of sleeping sickness in Uganda from 1900. By 1901, it became severe with death toll estimated to about 20,000. More than 250,000 people died in the epidemic that lasted for two decades. The disease commonly popularised as "negro lethargy" was not known to be related to the fly disease. At the time, the human disease was believed to be either bacterial infection or helminth infection. The Royal Society constituted a three-member Sleeping Sickness Commission in 1902 to investigate the epidemic. Led by George Carmichael Low from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the team included his colleague Aldo Castellani and Cuthbert Christy, a medical officer on duty in Bombay, India. The expedition was a failure as they found that bacteria or helminths were not involved in the disease. The second Commission in 1902 was entrusted to Bruce, assisted by David Nunes Nabarro from the University College Hospital. By August 1903, Bruce and his team established that the disease was transmitted the tsetse fly, Glossina palpalis. The relationship with the fly disease in animals became obvious. In the third Commission (1908–1912) Bruce and his colleagues established the complete developmental stages of the trypanosome in tsetse fly. Honours and awards Bruce was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1899. He served as editor of the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps between 1904 and 1908. He was the recipient of the Cameron prize of Edinburgh University in 1901. He received the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1904, the Mary Kingsley Medal in 1905, and the Stewart prize