Cause of mystery sleeping sickness in Kazakhstan found

According to the Government of Kazakhstan, the cause of a mystery sleeping sickness in two Kazakh communities was due to uranium mines.

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 newspaper Komsomolskaya 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”, apsychosomatic 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 analyzing 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.

Read more here

Village in Kazakhstan hit with mystery sleep disorder

A small village in Kazakhstan is being hit with a mysterious sleep disorder where people fall asleep for days at a time.

Residents of a Kazakhstan town are being affected by a sleep disorder in which some fall asleep suddenly and don't wake up for days.

Over 150 cases since March 2013 have hit the town of Kalachi in northern Kazakhstan. The cause of the incidents, which come in waves, are unknown. The ninth wave of the mysterious illness was reported this week.

"The disease is characterized by the fact that the sickness immerses himself in unusually long sleep, while to bring them into full consciousness is practically impossible on the first day," said Leonid Rikhvanov of Russia's Tomsk Polytechnic University, who has studied the area for four years.

"During hospitalization, people exposed to the disease were marked by identical complaints: dizziness, weakness, loss of coordination, unconsciousness or semiconscious state for up to three days. After passing the first symptoms, they get headaches, become confused, and suffer emotional instability and memory disorders, which can last up to several weeks. In some cases, hallucinations occur, particularly in children. Some repeatedly fall asleep."

Rikhvanov suspects a nearby abandoned uranium mine is emitting radon, a colorless gas which could be working as an anesthetic or providing a narcotic effect. Other theories involve possible carbon monoxide poisoning and mass hysteria.

About 100 of Kalachi's 680 residents have been relocated to other parts of Kazakhstan, local government leader Amanbek Kalzhanov said.

Read more here

Conversion Disorder? Hysteria? "Real" Illness? The Twitching Girls in Le Roy, NY

Something strange happened shortly after school started last year in Le Roy, a tiny town of 7,500 people in Western New York. A handful of girls were stricken with bizarre twitches, tics, and spasms — all apparently involuntary. Soon the condition spread,and to date 19 people have exhibited symptoms Environmentalists descended on Le Roy, claiming pollution had to be to blame. But as New York Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, what happened to the girls in Le Roy may be more complicated than that.

Listen to the NPR broadcast or see the transcript here

See the NY Times story mentioned here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=us

Like everything else in high school, the girls’ symptoms were broken down by status: there were the kids who were really sick and then the kids whose illness was “psychological” and then the kids who were faking it so they could get on the news. No matter how many times the doctors explained that these symptoms were real, something the girls could not control, the finger-pointing persisted. One mother even went on Facebook to publicly accuse her daughter’s best friend of faking, before apologizing the next day. “If they were faking it, I’d like to know how they can cause it,” said Dave Watson, guardian for one of the affected cheerleaders. “It’s not like any one movement is more exaggerated than the next. It’s pretty damn consistent. I’d like someone to explain to me how they could walk around all day and do it consciously.”

Conversion disorder presents something of a paradox in that it engages some voluntary pathways in the brain but is experienced by the patient as wholly involuntary. One study found overlapping, but distinctly different, brain activity in patients diagnosed with conversion disorder and patients asked to “fake” the same illness, in this case a limp ankle, suggesting “more complex mental activity” in patients with conversion disorder. The very notion of what makes a movement feel voluntary — and whether movements actually are voluntary, or only feel that way as a result of some post hoc coordinating that happens in the brain — is another philosophical and neurological question.

Researchers think the illness might have something to do with the amygdala, a locus of startle and fear responses in the brain, which has been shown to be overactive in patients with conversion disorder. “Ordinarily, the amygdala might create psychological distress, but instead, in these cases, it would create an involuntary movement,” says Mark Hallett, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He added, though, that while the theory is plausible, “we’re at a primitive level” in terms of understanding how it works.

Conversion disorder is somewhat better understood now than it was when the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot displayed his patients’ fainting fits to hundreds of dazzled audience members in the 1870s. Fainting and nonepileptic seizures are common symptoms, as are seemingly paralyzed limbs; less common, but still well represented, are certain types of tics and twitches. Recent research has confirmed some of Freud’s early theorizing on the subject, finding that a history of trauma is higher in patients with conversion disorder than in other kinds of psychiatric patients.

Part of what is baffling about the Le Roy case is that it seems to combine two equally poorly understood phenomena: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness. Jennifer McVige, a doctor at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo who has seen 14 patients from Le Roy (neither Katie nor Thera is her patient), has said that most of them are dealing with serious stressors or trauma. That history is somewhat unusual for mass psychogenic illness, which is not generally thought to target people with a particular psychological background. In other ways, however, the case in Le Roy is a textbook example. Half of mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools, and they are far more common in young women than any other category. Simon Wessely, an epidemiologist at King’s College in London and chairman of the department of psychological medicine, estimates that hundreds of outbreaks occur every year in the United States — just this past November, 22 students fell ill with stomach complaints at a football game in Houston, and no one so much as noticed outside the local news. Motor mass hysterias — twitching, fainting, stuttering — are more rare and draw more attention. In the past 10 years there have been three such outbreaks in the United States, which Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist specializing in the subject at Botany Downs Secondary College in Auckland, New Zealand, says is a surprising number for so short a period of time.

How could one person’s illness be reflected in another person’s neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother’s bleed.

Any two people, as they try to delicately disagree or flirt or compare notes on the best route to Boston, might unwittingly match vocal tones or even frequency of eye blinks. In one study, researchers found that subjects trying to form an alliance with someone else subconsciously tap their feet to match the tapping of that person’s foot, or touch their faces with the same frequency. “It’s happening unconsciously, but it is serving the goals you need it to serve,” says Jessica Lakin, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Drew University in New Jersey, who studies what’s known as the chameleon effect. Another study contrived to make subjects feel excluded from an online game; when those subjects were next introduced to someone new, they matched foot-tapping even more assiduously (and equally subconsciously) as if all the more motivated, at some primal level, to bond through physical mimicry. Mass psychogenic illness, whatever its mysterious mechanism, seems deeply connected to empathy and to a longing for what social psychologists call affiliation: belonging.