Nodding syndrome is a bizarre new disease discovered that has been afflicting children in southern Sudan. The most common characteristic of this condition is uncontrollable nodding at the mere sight of food. This horrible condition progresses from there to severe seizures, mental retardation, and even death. The mortality of it can come by either brain damage from the nodding or starving to death because of the inability to eat.
The disease first began getting major press on Saturday, January 31, 2004. An article on Yahoo.com focuses on a 13 year old girl named Martha Halim. She was afraid of food and eating, among other things. Her parents tried traditional medicine, like taking her to a hospital to get anti-epileptic drugs. Those did not work. Then they tried the use of a witch doctor and doing a ritual where she crawled through a termite mound while her mom and dad slit the throat of goat. Guess what? That didn't work, either.
Almost like something out of a Stephen King novel, what Martha describes experiencing just before the seizure is both baffling and frightening: "When it comes, it looks like a black cloud but in the shape of a human. That's all I know. At the end, I find myself on the floor."
Nodding syndrome has so far bewildered the experts and afflicted more than 300 children. The World Health Organization began investigating it in 2002, which was around a year after Martha's first symptom of nodding syndrome. Peter Spencer, an American neurotoxicologist working for WHO had a strange encounter with another 13 year old stricken with the disease.
He said: "I was able to demonstrate with her that she was a regular nodder with local food and by contrast she did not nod when eating a variety of American food -- candy bars or whatever. It was absolutely staggering."
Desperate for some way, any way, to help Martha and others like her, Sudanese have delved into superstition, trying things like washing the bad spirits away and sacrificing sheep. Doctors working with WHO have only one working theory, that it might be related to a disease seen in Uganda called Nakalanga syndrome which indeed also features convulsions, but stunted growth, and, yes, sometimes nodding.
One theory was that the condition arose from the eating of monkeys; it was thought to perhaps be something similar to mad cow disease or ebola. But this has been ruled out. The connection might still be food, but it is unlikely, according to Spencer. He has also found no obvious environmental causes. The disease continues to baffle all who study it.
Source: www.yahoo.com
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