People in two villages fell asleep for days at a time

NUR-SULTAN: In a bizarre incident, people in two tiny villages fell asleep suddenly for days and woke up with memory loss, grogginess, weakness and headaches in Kazakhstan.

According to the details, the mysterious illness has affected more than 140 people in Kalachi and Krasnogorsk since March 2013.

Some of the villagers fell victim more than half a dozen times, with sufferers sleeping for up to six days at a time. The strange sickness would affect both old and young.

“The sick person appears to be conscious and can even walk. But all the same he then falls into a deep sleep and snores, and when they wake him up … the person remembers absolutely nothing,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported after a 2014 investigation.

Even pets were not immune. Yelena Zhavoronkova, a resident of Kalachi, said that her cat Marquis suddenly “went stupid” on a Friday night and began meowing and attacking walls, furniture and the family dog.

“He fell asleep toward morning and snored like a human until lunchtime on Saturday. He didn’t react to anything, not even cat food,” Zhavoronkova added.

The cases eventually drew the attention of the government and hundreds of people from the villages were shifted to another place.

Mystery of sleeping sickness is solved:

After analyzing the results of medical examinations of all the residents, scientists concluded that it was caused by heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air.

Kazakhstan’s deputy PM, Berdibek Saparbaev said, “Now the mystery has at last been solved and the cause does indeed lie in the uranium mines.”

 “The uranium mines were closed at some point, and at times a concentration of carbon monoxide occurs there. The oxygen in the air is reduced accordingly, which is the real reason for the sleeping sickness in these villages.”