Two new cases of sleeping sickness in Akmola rgn

Two Krasnogorsk villagers have been diagnosed with the so called "sleeping sickness", according to the regional Department for Emergency Situations, azh.zk refers to inform.kz.

Two residents of Krasnogorsk were hospitalized in Yesil district hospital. One of them is an 8-year-old schoolboy, the other - a retiree born in 1948. Both have been diagnosed with encephalopathy of unknown etiology. At the moment the patients are under the supervision of doctors. 

It bears to remind that the first case of the manifestation of this sleeping disease occurred in Kalachi in March 2013. And the disease breaks out once every few months. Ten percent of the village population exceeding 600 people has been infected with this disease.

Numerous commissions from the Ministry for Healthcare, scientists from the Institute of Radiation Medicine and Ecology, other specialists, despite thousands of studies, have not been able to establish the exact cause of the disease. Specialists excluded infectious and bacterial factors and assured that the radiation background in the village was within normal limits. The maximum permissible concentration of salt and heavy metals was not exceeded. Noteworthy, the village of Kalachi is 600 meters far from the former urban-type settlement of Krasnogorsk, the population of which used to count 6.5 thousand people, mostly miners. The settlement belonged to the ore-mining industry of the former USSR. Uranium ore was mined near the village before the 1990s.