The world has seen its fair share of awful epidemics, but no modern-day disease has been quite so mysterious as Encephalitis lethargica. The sickness first appeared in 1916, but it really started spreading during the ’20s. The disease caused all sorts of symptoms like tremors, psychosis, and drowsiness, and it was incredibly lethal, killing around a million people. Those who survived were often locked inside their own bodies.
A staggering 20% of victims were invalids for the rest of their lives, and only 14% ever fully recovered. Making things worse, doctors had no clue what was happening. They knew the disease attacked the brain (E. lethargica means “inflammation of the brain that makes you tired”), but that was about it. They didn’t know where it came from, or how to stop it.
Then, in the late ’20s the disease simply vanished, leaving a staggering number of comatose patients in its wake. For decades, it seemed like the sickness was gone for good, until it reared its ugly head in 1993, infecting approximately 20 people. This time around, however, a trio of doctors—John Oxford, Andrew Church, and Russell Dale—cracked the E. lethargica code.
These medical professionals discovered that most modern-day victims had started off with sore throats, caused by a rare form of streptococcus. This bizarre bacterium would then mutate and cause the immune system to attack the brain. With that in mind, the researchers looked back at old cases and discovered that, in the 1920s, many patients suffered from sore throats caused by — you guessed it — a kind of streptococcus.
Unfortunately, while scientists now have a good idea of what causes this “sleepy sickness,” there’s still no cure.
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