Bizarre sleeping sickness affects Russian Village
                                        

A Russian woman has fallen the latest victim of a mysterious "sleeping illness" that has gripped a small village in Kazakhstan, causing its sufferers to fall asleep for no apparent reason and stay so for days at a time.
The 58-year-old Russian national and three Kazakh citizens were airlifted from the village of Kalachi — to which the outbreak of the illness seems to be confined — to the Kazakh capital Astana for treatment, Interfax reported earlier this week, citing the deputy chief of the Esil district, Saule Agymbayeva.
More than 100 people have contracted the disease since the first case was recorded in the spring of 2013, Agymbayeva was quoted as saying. Doctors and researchers have struggled to come up with any coherent explanation for the mysterious disorder, nicknamed the "sleeping illness" in Russian media.

Those suffering from the illness simply fall asleep at random — on the streets, at work or at school — with nothing able to wake them up. Many then awaken days later, often suffering from memory loss and hallucinations, according to Russian and Kazakh media reports.
Speculations about the roots of the disease abound, with theories including mass psychosis, poisoning, insect bites, alien invasion and the radioactive effects of an abandoned Soviet-era uranium mine in the area.
But researchers have found no trace of any anomalies, poisons or elevated radiation levels around the village, nor any abnormal test results in the sufferers — except for the fact that they just stay asleep, according to media reports.

The official name for the illness is "encephalopathy of unknown etiology" — or, in layman's terms, a brain disorder that nobody can explain.
"We have ruled out infections, we checked blood and spinal fluid, nothing is there," doctor Kabdrashit Almagambetov from Esil, the capital of the district, told The Siberian Times.
Doctors had initially "categorized it as toxic encephalopathy, but 'toxic' is just a guess here, and encephalopathy is just the title of the set of brain diseases," he was quoted as saying.
culled:moscowtimes