Bambi Eloriaga-Amago
Like the hapless kingdom in the movie Sleeping Beauty, where citizens fell under Maleficent’s spell, residents at a town in Kazakhstan have fallen prey to a sleeping sickness.
The Smithsonian.com reports that as of March this year, the number of recorded cases have risen to 152. On average, every family in the village of Kalachi has had at least one family member suffer from the illness. The first few cases were initially recorded in March, 2013. Residents started falling asleep at random; at school, work, even while riding motorcycles. The duration of sleep also seemed random. Some cases lasted hours, some a couple of days, while some lasted a full week. If one attempted to wake the afflicted, they reported the ill person as wanting to open their eyes, but struggling to stay awake.
Upon waking, some patients were able to resume normal life. However, quite a number experienced complications such as memory loss, nausea, and even hallucinations. One boy reportedly “kept picking snails off himself,” believing the creatures were crawling all over his skin. Some patients complained of extreme sluggishness, acting as if they were drunk and slurring their speech. One woman described the fatigue she was experiencing as if she was “wearing a hundred pairs of boots.” She further told online news site RT News that it was difficult to ask for help as “your tongue gets twisted.”
For the past two years, various teams of doctors and scientists have been deployed to the town, but the exact cause of the sickness was difficult to pin down. As such, the Kazakhstan government scrambled to form a research coordination commission that ran, by the end of last year, 20,000 laboratory and clinical tests on samples from the air, water, soil, food, and animals; and even conducting tests on the patients themselves.
This month, government officials have announced the research results. IFLScience.com reports that uranium mines near the village are the culprit. The mines, shut down after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are said to be a source of heightened carbon monoxide levels.
At least, that is the “official” statement on the situation. But it’s not quite an open-and-shut case. While some patients do exhibit symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning, some researchers are not entirely convinced carbon monoxide is the culprit. Claude Pinatadosi, a pulmonologist at Duke University, told science journal Wired that carbon monoxide is a product of combustion. And because the process of combustion is required, why would the mines – which have been inactive for years – be producing the said gas?
Other experts’ opinion on the cause vary, ranging from toxic encephalopathy (a sort of brain malfunction) to mass hypnosis.
