Mystery of Kazakhstan sleeping
sickness solved, says government
More than 140 people in two tiny villages were hit by
the illness, with sufferers drifting off for up to six days – now scientists
appear to have discovered the cause
A flock of birds at night in northern Kazakhstan,
where two villages are being evacuated after people began falling asleep at
random, even while walking. Photograph: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
Friday 17 July 201517.09 BSTLast modified on Saturday 18 July 201500.02 BST
Scientists have
discovered the cause of a strange sleeping sickness affecting residents of two
villages in northern Kazakhstan, the
government has said.
Since March 2013, the mysterious illness has
affected more than 140 people in Kalachi and Krasnogorsk, dusty settlements in
the huge Kazakh steppe, with a total population of 810 people, mostly ethnic
Russians and Germans. Villagers would fall asleep suddenly, even while walking,
and wake up with memory loss, grogginess, weakness and headaches. Some fell
victim more than half a dozen times, with sufferers sleeping for up to six days
at a time.
“The sick person
appears to be conscious and can even walk. But all the same he then falls into
a deep sleep and snores, and when they wake him up … the person remembers
absolutely nothing,” the newspaperKomsomolskaya Pravda reported after
a 2014 investigation.
The sickness would
affect both old and young, with children dropping off at school. Some reported
nightmarish hallucinations: local children Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin
told Komsomolskaya Pravda they had seen winged horses, snakes in their beds and
worms eating their hands.
Even pets were not
immune. Kalachi resident Yelena Zhavoronkova told the newspaper Vremya that
her cat Marquis suddenly “went stupid” on a Friday night and began meowing and
attacking walls, furniture and the family dog.
“He fell asleep toward
morning and snored like a human until lunchtime on Saturday. He didn’t react to
anything, not even cat food,” Zhavoronkova said.
Doctors tested Marquis
and other sufferers, but the mysterious illness defied all explanation. At
first they thought the patients were suffering the after-effects of counterfeit
vodka, but as the epidemic grew they began diagnosing people with
“encephalopathy of an unknown origin”, a generic term for brain illnesses, Interfax reported.
Many suspected the
nearby uranium mines that were closed after the fall of the Soviet Union,
leaving Krasnogorsk a ghost town with only 130 of its former 6,500 residents.
Kazakhstan’s health ministry tested more than 7,000 nearby homes but didn’t
find significantly high levels of radiation or of heavy metals and their salts.
It detected raised radium levels in some homes, but it was not enough to
explain the phenomenon.
Even sleep disorder
experts could not find a cause. One somnologist told Komsomolskaya Pravda in
2014 that the two isolated villages were most likely suffering from a case of
mass psychosis similar to the “Bin Laden itch”, a psychosomatic rash
that afflicted children in the US as fears of terrorist attacks peaked in 2002.
Now the mystery has at
last been solved and the cause does indeed lie in the uranium mines, said
Kazakhstan’s deputy PM, Berdibek Saparbaev. After analysing the results of
medical examinations of all the residents, researchers concluded that it was
caused by heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air.
“The uranium mines
were closed at some point, and at times a concentration of carbon monoxide
occurs there,” Saparbaev said. “The oxygen in the air is reduced accordingly,
which is the real reason for the sleeping sickness in these villages.”
Evacuation of the two
villages has begun, with authorities reportedly relocating 68 of 223 families
so far.
