Editing Belgian Congo (section)

===Health care===
[[File:White nurses of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga April 1918.JPG|thumb|right|Nurses of the [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] and their Congolese assistants, [[Lubumbashi|Élisabethville]], 1918]]
Health care, too, was largely supported by the missions, although the colonial state took an increasing interest. In 1906 the [[Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp|Institute of Tropical Medicine]] was founded in Brussels. The ITM was, and still is, one of the world's leading institutes for training and research in tropical medicine and the organisation of health care in developing countries. Endemic diseases, such as [[African trypanosomiasis|sleeping sickness]], were all but eliminated through large-scale and persistent campaigns.<ref>A critical assessment of the colonial obsession with sleeping sickness in: Lyons, Maryinez (1992), ''The Colonial Disease, A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940'', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</ref>
In 1925 medical missionary Dr. [[Arthur Lewis Piper]] was the first person to use and bring tryparsamide, the Rockefeller Foundation's drug to cure sleeping sickness, to the Congo.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Klingman |first=Jack |title=Arthur Lewis Piper, M.D.: A Medical Missionary in the Belgian Congo |journal=Journal of Community Health |volume=19 |issue=2 |year=1994 |pages=125–146 |doi=10.1007/BF02260364 |pmid=8006209 |s2cid=37502216}}</ref> The health-care infrastructure expanded steadily throughout the colonial period, with a comparatively high availability of hospital beds relative to the population and with dispensaries set up in the most remote regions. In 1960 the country had a medical infrastructure that far surpassed any other African nation at that time. The Belgian Congo had 3,000 health care facilities, of which 380 were hospitals. There were 5.34 [[List of OECD countries by hospital beds|hospital beds for every 1000 inhabitants]] (1 for every 187 inhabitants). Great progress was also made in the fight against endemic diseases; the numbers of reported cases of sleeping sickness went from 34,000 cases in 1931 to 1,100 cases in 1959, mainly by eradicating the [[tsetse fly]] in densely populated areas. All Europeans and Congolese in the Belgian Congo received vaccinations for [[polio]], [[measles]] and [[yellow fever]]. Vast disease prevention programmes were rolled out, aimed at eradicating polio, [[leprosy]] and [[tuberculosis]]. In the primary schools, disease prevention campaigns were implemented, and disease prevention classes were part of the curriculum.<ref name="Maere d 2011. p.319"/>