Over 140 People Fell Asleep for 6 Days in Kazakhstan Town, Researches Finally Uncovers Mystery of Sleeping Sickness

According to the authorities, the sleeping sickness mystery has been solved. Researchers believe they have found the illness's cause after more than 140 people in two small villages fell ill and drifted off for up to six days.

(Photo : Kinga Cichewicz/Unspalsh)

Kazakhstan Sleeping Sickness

According to the government, researchers have figured out what causes a peculiar sleeping illness that affects people in two villages in northern Kazakhstan.

More than 140 persons in Kalachi and Krasnogorsk, two dusty towns in the vast Kazakh steppe with a combined population of 810, the majority of whom are of ethnic Russian and German descent, have been affected by the strange ailment since March 2013. Villagers would wake up with headaches, memory loss, drowsiness, and weakness after falling asleep unexpectedly, even while walking. Sleeping for up to six days at a stretch, some victims were victims more than half a dozen times.

"The sick person seems conscious and even moves around. However, he soon passes out and snores, and when they wake him up, he has no memory of anything, according to a 2014 inquiry conducted in the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

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Affecting Everyone

(Photo : Photo by Keystone View/FPG/Getty Images)

Children would miss school due to illness, impacting both young and old. Two local kids, Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin, informed Komsomolskaya Pravda they had seen winged horses, snakes in their beds, and worms devouring their hands.

Even animals could not escape. Yelena Zhavoronkova, a local of Kalachi, claims that her cat Marquis "got mad" and started meowing and biting the family dog, furniture, and walls on a Friday night.

He passed out at dawn and snored like a person till Saturday midday. Even cat food did not affect him, according to Zhavoronkova.

Doctors checked Marquis and other patients, but there was no cure for the mysterious ailment. At first, doctors believed the patients were experiencing the effects of fake vodka. Still, as the epidemic spread, they started diagnosing patients with "encephalopathy of an unknown origin," a catchall phrase for several brain disorders.

Dozens of Speculations

Many believed that the adjacent uranium mines, abandoned after the Soviet Union fell and left Krasnogorsk with only 130 of its 6,500 former population, were to blame. Kazakhstan's health ministry inspected more than 7,000 surrounding residences, but no abnormally high amounts of radiation or heavy metals and their salts were discovered. Some households found elevated radium levels, but this was insufficient to explain the phenomenon.

Even sleep disorder specialists failed to identify a cause. In 2014, a somnologist told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the two remote villages were probably experiencing a mass psychosis comparable to the "Bin Laden itch," a skin condition that affected kids in the US as terror strikes concerns peaked in 2002.

Now that the riddle has been cleared, Berdibek Saparbaev, Kazakhstan's deputy prime minister, confirmed that the uranium mines are the root of the problem. Researchers concluded that it was brought on by elevated levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air after examining the findings of all the residents' medical tests.

The uranium mines were shut down at some point, and carbon monoxide concentrations occasionally occurred there, according to Saparbaev. Accordingly, there is less oxygen in the air, which is the actual cause of the sleeping illness in these areas.