Economo's epidemic lethargic encephalitis, otherwise called sleeping sickness, is one of the strangest diseases in the history of medicine. The people who caught him began to want to sleep all the time - and often did not wake up. A mysterious epidemic in the 1920s spread to many countries, including. to the Soviet Union.
Disease onset
For the first time, symptoms similar to epidemic encephalitis were observed in the 17th century among the inhabitants of London. However, the disease did not return for more than two centuries - until the winter of 1916-17, when people in Vienna and other European cities suddenly began to fall asleep. One of the first cases was described near Verdun in France, where the disease struck the soldiers of the Entente.
In 1920-21, the pandemic was in full swing. Sleeping sickness was transmitted by airborne droplets - its causative agent, it is believed, was an unknown virus. There is speculation that the outbreak was causally related to the Spanish flu epidemic that raged in 1918-1919. Either the organisms of Europeans, weakened by the flu, became “easy prey” for the new virus, or encephalitis became a late complication of the “Spanish flu”.
Death from sleeping sickness occurred either in a coma, or, on the contrary, with chronic insomnia. The total number of victims of the epidemic is estimated at 1.6 million people - this is a third of all cases. Some survivors for the rest of their lives turned into a kind of "living statues", having lost the ability to move and speak.
Sleeping sickness in the land of the Soviets
From Romania, an epidemic of lethargic encephalitis spread to Ukraine and Russia. For example, in the Nizhny Novgorod province, the first case of the disease was noted in March 1921, and over the next 3 years, 18 men and 13 women fell ill in this territory.
In Moscow, the first carriers of the infection appeared in September 1922, and after another 2 months there was an upsurge in visits to doctors with strange symptoms. At the beginning of 1923, according to Mikhail Margulis, professor of the Department of Nervous Diseases at Moscow University, the number of cases in the capital of the USSR was about 100 people, and the peak of the incidence was in January. Of the patients of the Old Catherine Hospital who were diagnosed with this diagnosis, every fourth patient died.
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“Encephalitis is not a disease of the proletarian classes: patients are recruited from all walks of life,” the neurologist noted. Professor Margulis also said that encephalitis had different manifestations, but the most common was the lethargic form - the patients fell into a dream that could last for weeks or months. At the same time, the patients had an increased body temperature. They could be stirred up, but they fell asleep even while eating. There was paralysis of the eye muscles, drooping of the eyelids, in some cases strabismus developed. Due to the fact that it was difficult to breathe, during sleep, patients often took strange postures. To protect themselves from infection, Margulis advised Muscovites to take "the same protective measures as for other infectious diseases."
In connection with the outbreak of the disease in the USSR, a commission was created to study lethargic encephalitis. On the basis of clinical observations, the monographs of Nikolai Chetverikov, Alexander Grinshtein, as well as collective medical collections were published. Some Soviet clinicians, according to researcher Joel Vilensky, noted an increased prevalence of sleeping sickness among the Jewish population, as well as a correlation of the disease with injuries and other illnesses. However, doctors in the USSR, like their Western colleagues, could not offer effective methods of treatment.
The global epidemic of lethargic encephalitis began to fade in 1925 and finally stopped after 2 years. The disease did not return anymore - now it occurs only sporadically, and no longer in its typical form. Today, Economo's encephalitis is called a "clinical rarity." It is noteworthy that the last major outbreak was recorded precisely in the post-Soviet territory - in 2014, 33 residents of the Akmola region of Kazakhstan fell ill.
Timur Sagdiev