Solving the Kalachi Sleeping Sickness
By James Donahue
The residents of Kalachi, a small town in Kazakhstan near the Russian border, were contending with a strange sleeping sickness that also stole their memories.
First occurring in about 2012, the disease lasted for three years before researchers determined its source. It was discovered that a noxious gas was seeping from an abandoned uranium mine under the town that was poisoning the people.
For a while the problem was so strange the town was nicknamed "Sleepy Hollow" and the "Village of the Damned." People were falling unconscious for days. Men were experiencing unnatural sex drives, and children were reporting bizarre hallucinations.
It was said that men would wake up after long periods of unnatural sleep with erections and craving sex. This constant state of arousal lasted up to a month for some of the victims.
Other symptoms of this perplexing disease included extreme fatigue and dizzy spells so severe that the patients could not remain standing.
Sometimes large groups of people were stricken within minutes or hours of each other. One news report noted that eight children fell asleep within an hour on the first day of school. In another case, about 60 people were stricken with the disease in a single day.
A report by Joanna Rothkopf in Salon noted that doctors and scientists from all over have visited the community, located in the former Soviet Union, in an attempt to discover the cause of the illness. They have conducted bacterial and viral tests and ruled out parasitic diseases, even going to far as testing for trypanosomiasis, a sleeping sickness caused by the bite of a fly that is native to certain areas of Africa.
That Kalachi is located near an old uranium mine also was tested. The National Nuclear Center’s Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute of Kazakhstan ruled out radon as the cause of the problem. Researchers finally concluded that the culprit was, indeed, carbon monoxide and other gases that were seeping from the mine into the basements of the houses.
The entire town of Kalachi and a neighboring city of Krasnogorsk, which have both been affected, are now being evacuated. A total of 223 families are involved.
By James Donahue
The residents of Kalachi, a small town in Kazakhstan near the Russian border, were contending with a strange sleeping sickness that also stole their memories.
First occurring in about 2012, the disease lasted for three years before researchers determined its source. It was discovered that a noxious gas was seeping from an abandoned uranium mine under the town that was poisoning the people.
For a while the problem was so strange the town was nicknamed "Sleepy Hollow" and the "Village of the Damned." People were falling unconscious for days. Men were experiencing unnatural sex drives, and children were reporting bizarre hallucinations.
It was said that men would wake up after long periods of unnatural sleep with erections and craving sex. This constant state of arousal lasted up to a month for some of the victims.
Other symptoms of this perplexing disease included extreme fatigue and dizzy spells so severe that the patients could not remain standing.
Sometimes large groups of people were stricken within minutes or hours of each other. One news report noted that eight children fell asleep within an hour on the first day of school. In another case, about 60 people were stricken with the disease in a single day.
A report by Joanna Rothkopf in Salon noted that doctors and scientists from all over have visited the community, located in the former Soviet Union, in an attempt to discover the cause of the illness. They have conducted bacterial and viral tests and ruled out parasitic diseases, even going to far as testing for trypanosomiasis, a sleeping sickness caused by the bite of a fly that is native to certain areas of Africa.
That Kalachi is located near an old uranium mine also was tested. The National Nuclear Center’s Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute of Kazakhstan ruled out radon as the cause of the problem. Researchers finally concluded that the culprit was, indeed, carbon monoxide and other gases that were seeping from the mine into the basements of the houses.
The entire town of Kalachi and a neighboring city of Krasnogorsk, which have both been affected, are now being evacuated. A total of 223 families are involved.