Residents of the almost abandoned Soviet town of
Krasnogorsk and the areas around Kalachi village, in Kazakhstan, are
prone to a mysterious ‘sleeping beauty’ syndrome. The bizarre condition
has people suddenly dozing off for as long as six days at a time. It’s
like a bad horror film – the illness has gripped these regions and no
one knows the reason behind it. Scientists and experts are truly
perplexed by the phenomenon.
The weird sleeping illness isn’t prevalent all the time.
Instead, it comes in waves – the first one occurred in March 2013. There have been three more since then – around New
Year 2014, just after the winter holidays this year, and now again in
May. A total of 40 to 60 people have suffered in the scarcely populated
region. In most of the cases, the sleep is accompanied by temporary
memory loss.
One of the first victims of the syndrome was Maria Felk, a
50-year-old milkmaid from Kalachi. “I was milking cows, as usual, early
in the morning, and fell asleep,” she said. “I remember nothing at all.
Only that when I came around, I was in the hospital ward. The nurses
smiled at me and said, ‘Welcome back sleeping princess, you’ve finally
woken up.’ What else do I remember? Nothing. I slept for two days and
two nights. The women in my ward said that I tried to wake up several
times, saying I urgently needed to milk my cows.”
Interestingly, the strange disease is not limited to
locals. It extends to visitors as well, like 30-year-old Alexey Gom, who
was visiting his mother-in-law in Kalachi. “I came with my wife to
visit my mother-in-law,” he said. “In the morning I wanted to finish my
work. I switched on my laptop, opened the pages that I needed to finish
reading – and that was it. It felt like somebody pressed a button to
switch me off.”
“I woke up in the hospital, with my wife and mother-in-law
by my bedside. The doctor found nothing wrong with me after a series of
tests he performed. I slept for more than 30 hours. But it never
happened to me before, never in my life, or to anyone from my family,”
said Alexey.
I’d say Alexey and Maria were actually lucky. There have
been reports of people falling asleep for almost a week. And it is
rumored that one man might have been mistaken to be dead and buried
alive! Some people have had repeated episodes, like Lyubov Belkova, a
clothes seller at the local market. She has been a victim of sleep no
less than seven times. Her daughter suffered twice, and her 15-year-old
granddaughter, once. And her co-workers at the market have all fallen
asleep at different times as well.
It’s quite baffling that some families are repeatedly
affected, while others seem completely immune to the illness. The only
common factor – it seems to happen mainly to ethnic Russians and
Germans. There’s no knowing when the disease will strike, so the
villagers always have a packed bag at hand, in case they need to be
rushed to the hospital.
When the first epidemic occurred in 2013, doctors thought
it was a case of bad quality vodka. But it turned out that none of the
six people who fell asleep back then had consumed any alcohol. Some
locals believe that the problem crops up after a sudden rise in the
atmospheric temperature. Another theory suggests that water from a
nearby unused Uranium mine is seeping into the local rivers, and being
consumed by locals.
Several scientists have visited the remote backwater
region, seeking explanations for the sleep epidemic. They conducted
about 7,000 experiments on the area’s soil and water, on the victims’
blood samples, hair and nails. They discounted underground gas and local
cell phone signals. They tested homes for the presence of radon gas,
high radiation levels, heavy metal salts, bacteria and viruses. All the
tests proved inconclusive.
At one point, Krasnogorsk was a secret town run directly by
Moscow, with 6,500 residents who worked on the Uranium mine. Their life
was quite prosperous, but things changed drastically after the Soviet
breakup. Only 130 people remain in Krasnogorsk and Kalachi has a
population of 680. They mostly live with scarce supplies and not even
the heating works properly in the winter.
According to Doctor Kabdrashit Almagambetov, at the
district capital of Esil, “When a patient wakes up, he will remember
nothing. The story is one and the same each time – weakness, slow
reactions, then fast sleep.” One of his patients, Alexander
Pavlyuchenko, fell into a long slumber while visiting the local
cemetery. When he finally woke up, he insisted that he had been on a
fishing expedition all along.
“Sadly, the nature of the condition is still not known,”
said Dr. Kabdrashit. “We have excluded infections, we checked blood and
spine liquid, nothing is there. We categorized it as toxic
encephalopathy, but ‘toxic’ is just a guess here, and encephalopathy is
just the title of the set of brain diseases.”
A couple of children who also suffered the sleep epidemic
were affected by hallucinations as well. Misha Plyukhin, one of the
kids, said he saw light bulbs and horses flying around him, and then saw
his mother with eight eyes and a trunk. Then he felt snakes and worms
in his bed, eating his arms. Rudolf Boyarinos, the other kid, doesn’t
remember much. But he did yell ‘monsters!’ a lot when he was out cold.
The two boys are back in school now but are finding it difficult to
cope.
Leonid Rikhvanov, a professor of geo-ecology and geo-chemistry at Tomsk Polytechnical
University, has some good news to offer. Along with his team, he
studied the samples of uranium that a resident of Kalachi sent him. “We
tested the samples and came to the conclusion that Radon gas is the
reason, but it is not because of radioactive Radon. It comes from the
chemical effect of the gas. In other words, the disease is caused by
evaporation from the mine,” he said. However, more tests are needed to
confirm this theory.
But is Radon really the true cause? Dr. Kabdrashit, who is
an anaesthesiologist himself, said that he uses similar gases and
patients wake up an hour or two after surgery. “These people sleep for
two to six days, what is the concentration of this gas then? And why
does one person fall asleep and somebody who lives with him does not?”
Unfortunately, there are no answers to this question and
more. Nurlan Kapparov, Kazakhstan’s Environmental Protection and Water
Resources minister has pledged to discover the cause of the outbreak.
Let’s hope the mystery is solved soon.
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