Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysterie

Ellipse

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
A fascinating look at a bizarre, forgotten epidemic from the national bestselling author of The American Plague.
In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it arrived.
Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims-who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.
Molly Caldwell Crosby, 304 pages

I put it here for the record. I only had a glimpse of it. Seven cases are examined. The conclusion seem to be more or less "encephalitis lethargic". Would be interesting to check if fireballs were noticed at the time or a bit before the period.

Extract:
With the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica so widely forgotten in the United States, it is a wonder that the subject ever came to my attention. Sleeping sickness may have been “the forgotten epidemic” to most, but for me it was always present in my grandmother Virginia. The prologue touched on her story. The year was 1929, and she was sixteen years old, living in Dallas, Texas. She had an infection of some type and was feverish the day she fell down the staircase of her parents’ home.
Her parents put her to bed, and she fell asleep—the long, frightening sleep so many patients in this book experienced. She did not open her eyes for 180 days, missing most of her school year. In the days before modern diagnostic tools, her pulse grew so shallow that she was declared dead three different times by her doctors.
And then, miraculously, she awoke. A third of all sleeping sickness patients did recover. Physically, she remained weak and was never able to return to school. Thankful to have her awake again and recovering well, her family did not immediately notice the changes in her personality.
 

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Interesting find, Ellipse. Thanks for signaling and sharing. :cool2:

There still is an epidemic wave of sleeping sickness circling around, according to recent SOTT articles:

http://www.sott.net/article/290232-Villagers-in-Kazakhstan-are-falling-asleep-en-masse-for-no-apparent-reason
http://www.sott.net/article/293324-Sleepy-Hollow-redux-Ninth-wave-of-mysterious-sleeping-sickness-strikes-Kazakhstan

And it seems also still a very common disease in Africa:

http://www.sott.net/article/247926-Secrets-of-Parasites-Replication-Unraveled
http://www.sott.net/article/250553-Bacterium-Transforms-Into-Weapon-Against-Sleeping-Sickness
 
Thanks for the links Palinurus!

This is totally similar of the first link:
The sleep is so deep that some locals fear an old man they assumed was dead could have been buried alive.

Just to be clear, seven cases are exterminated because data was here (doctors report and so on) but this was apparently an epidemic too.
 
Very mysterious. Thanks for sharing. I'd read the articles on the sleeping sickness in Kazakhstan and I'd like to know more.

This is a book to add to my list.
 
Thanks for sharing Ellipse.

This books sounds interesting, so I went to Amazon.com and added it to my Wish List for future reading. While there I noticed the paragraph below which is the first review listed under the Editorial Reviews section. I've bolded the very last sentence which got me wondering what it could mean. It seems there is not a second edition.

On the heels of World War I, another atrocity emerged to take millions more lives: flu. Overshadowed by that worldwide viral menace was an equally—indeed, Crosby believes, an even more—frightening killer, encephalitis lethargica (EL). If the name rings no bell, perhaps that isn’t surprising, since the malady claimed “only” a million lives, though it left at least that many more permanently disabled, before dropping off epidemiologists’ maps around 1927. The illness’ popular moniker, sleeping sickness, is more familiar, to the point of seeming innocuous. But the disease was and is anything but. No one has ever been able to articulate its etiology. Just because it flared up during a flu pandemic doesn’t mean it is linked to flu by either causation or correlation. Yet the concurrence cannot be discounted. What’s more, the disease is unpredictable, having re-emerged a couple times since the 1920s. Crosby and others fear EL may return simultaneously with another worldwide outbreak of flu. Medical science is, they insist, no better prepared for it than it was 90 years ago. --Donna Chavez --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 
Mysterious indeed. Considering the timing of the first sleeping sickness epidemic and what's going on in the world now and what's happening in Kazakhstan, it makes you wonder.. What is else is in store, and could the cause of the sleeping sickness also be responsible for other types of sickness?
 
Thanks. This is amazing. And scary!

Long time ago I worked with a girl that his father died from "la maladie du sommeil", the sleepless illness that a fly gives to you in some parts of Africa. It is a very hard core death, with terrible sufferance, little by little you loose all your strength and died after that. I think also that the psychiatrist Oliver Sachs treated some patients with a strange illness similar to the sleepless illness, people that were sleeping during long, long time. I don't remember where I read about it, maybe in an article.
 
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