The terrible disease known as lethargic sleep has been a mysterious disease for over 80 years. Doctors cannot say with certainty the cause of its occurrence. People lose consciousness and fall asleep. Some for a few hours, and some for months and years. Lethargy may return, but its cause has begun to be seen.
The mysterious disease appeared between 1916 and 1927 and quickly became an epidemic around the world.
Young people, especially women, were found to be the most vulnerable, but the disease affected people of all ages.
Hundreds of thousands of people died (according to other sources - millions), many of those who survived for many years remained "frozen" in their own bodies. Doctors call the disease Encaphilitis Lethargica, which means just "inflammation of the brain that makes you tired".
The reason was secret, but versions, of course, were expressed. Some doctors thought that lethargy was caused by an unknown virus, others confused it with the Spanish flu epidemic that raged in those years, and others saw the culprit in some weapon used in the First World War. But even now, more than 80 years later, scientists find it difficult to name this very reason.
Although the epidemic seemed to have faded away in the same 1920s, in 1948 an outbreak of something similar was recorded in Iceland.
In addition, lethargy (or a disease with similar symptoms) has received many other names in recent years, such as Economo's disease, Cruchet's disease and Akureyri disease.
This means that some modern cases - and from time to time sleeping sickness makes itself felt - remain undiagnosed.
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So, virologist John Oxford (John Oxford) is sure that lethargy is not a disease of the past, it can return. And his fears have been confirmed more than once. For example, in 1993, British doctors came to the incredible conclusion: 23-year-old Becky Howells (Becky Howells) suffers from a disease that was last seen more than 70 years ago. Professor Oxford was just trying to help the girl, and from the very beginning he was convinced that the solution to the problem was in the past. He tracked down samples of brain tissue from victims of the 1920s epidemic and tried to find traces of the virus.
The scientist, like many of his other colleagues, thought it possible that the epidemic of lethargy was associated with the outbreak of the Spanish flu. The doctor looked for traces of a virus or infection, but nothing of the kind was found then, and Becky gradually recovered.
It should be noted here that for physicians who do not know the causes of sleeping sickness, it is very difficult to prescribe any specific treatment or prevent the disease.
Nevertheless, modern medicine is quite capable of maintaining the patient's breathing, providing him with food and protecting him from other infections, steroids can help reduce inflammation in the brain, and so on. Thus, the person is slowly returning to normal life.
In the 1920s, doctors could not do this, which is why there are so many deaths. Well, since the early 1990s, several more cases of lethargy have been recorded: four years ago, such a diagnosis was made to Patricia Vaughan. Just at that moment, two young English doctors - Russell Dale and his colleague Andrew Church - decided to study the mysterious disease. According to the BBC, the work of these doctors, published a few months ago in a little-known medical journal and not making much noise, may contain a clue to the causes of one of the most dangerous diseases of the 20th century.
Dale and Church first turned to the medical community for help and eventually managed to collect data on 20 patients.
Then they began to look for something in common between all the patients and found that many of the patients had sore throats before they were struck by lethargy. Thus, doctors began looking for traces of a bacterial infection that could be causing the sore throat. They were especially interested in the bacteria Streptoccus and their "relatives" - diplococci (Diplococcus).
And it turned out that all of their patients have a rare form of just the streptococcus bacteria. That is, the bacteria that can cause common sore throat have mutated and took on a form that provokes the attack of Encaphilitis Lethargica.
The immune system of some people, distracted by an attack of infection on the throat, allows the parasite to enter the nervous system, the midbrain is affected, and inflammation begins. Like that.
To test his guess, Dr. Dale re-examined the medical archives and discovered that, firstly, many victims of the epidemic of the 1920s also first suffered from angina, and, secondly, diplococcus is often mentioned in the records.
Indeed, it looks like Dale and Church have identified the cause of modern lethargy cases and may have uncovered an 80-year-old medical secret that the BBC is reporting on. Only now in the medical encyclopedia of the same British television and radio corporation in the section devoted to lethargy, this seemingly new information about streptococcus has long been contained, presenting a version called autoimmune disease. “Since no viruses were found, it is assumed that the syndrome is not caused by a virus entering and attacking the brain,” the encyclopedia says. "Maybe the body's own immune cells are attacking nerve cells?"
Be that as it may, Dale and Church continue their research work.