Imagine that you are walking, or even riding a bicycle, and suddenly you fall into a deep sleep from which you wake up weeks later. The funny thing is that it does not happen only to you, but to all the inhabitants of your city. Although this idea seems fantasy, it is not far from reality, as is the case of Kalachi, a village in Kazakhstan.
It sounds like a story or a science fiction novel, but it is not. For years, the people who inhabited this village suffered from this strange phenomenon, which was similar to narcolepsy, a neurological disorder that causes sudden sleep attacks, but seemed to be contagious, as it affected the entire village.
For many years, they did not find an explanation. Some thought they were haunted, others blamed vodka, but this phenomenon began to affect everyone: children, older adults and young people, becoming increasingly strange and uncontrollable.
What happened?
Local media such as ‘Eurasianet’ and ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’ reported the first cases in April 2010. The first testimony was from Lyubov Belkova, a villager.
She claimed that She was working in a supermarket, when she was suddenly invaded by an absurd exhaustion that made her lose consciousness instantly.
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Four days later, the woman woke up in the hospital disoriented, as she did not remember anything that had happened to her. At first, the doctors thought that she had suffered a stroke, but the tests did not agree and did not give an accurate diagnosis.
Things started to get weird when, a few days later, the same thing had happened to five other people in the town, including a child. The doctors were increasingly confused.
Another villager told his version in ‘Euresianet’: “I was driving my motorcycle on August 28 and suddenly I fell asleep”. It was not until September 2 that the subject woke up from the coma. Medical examinations of him gave no indication of any illness.
Subsequently, the symptoms changed. Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin, two children who lived in the village, recounted their cases in ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’, claiming to have had hallucinations.
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The little ones claimed to have seen winged horses next to their beds. In addition, they also felt like snakes and worms ate their hands and moved under their sheets.
Between 2013 and 2015more than 160 of the 810 inhabitants of Kalachi had been affected by this phenomenon. Several experts went to the scene to find out the causes, but no one could find an answer.
Was it the uranium?
The then deputy prime minister of Kazakhstan, Berdybeck Saparbayev, intervened in the case and gave a press conference explaining what had caused this curious disease.
“After having carried out a medical examination of all the inhabitants, we have received confirmation from the laboratories (…). The main cause is carbon monoxide,” said the president.
“When carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbon (CH) levels go up, oxygen goes down and causes these blackouts,” he added.
The answer lay in Krasnogorsk, a ghost town that borders Kalachi and had been abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are some uranium mines there that release carbon monoxide into the air.
For a long time, scientists could not find an explanation, because the mines were inactive. In addition, the levels of hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide, separately, were at normal levels.
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As explained by one of the investigators in the case Sergey Lukashenko, to the local media ‘The Astana Times’, is that “sleeping sickness manifests itself only with the combination of lack of oxygen and an excess of CO and CH”.
This means that neither uranium nor carbon monoxide are directly responsible for this phenomenon, but rather the chemical reactions that CO produces with oxygen, under certain atmospheric conditions, are what generate fainting.
But how is carbon monoxide emitted with such force if the plants had been abandoned? “Uranium has nothing to do with it. A lot of wooden structures were used when the mine was in operation. The mine was then closed and filled with water. When wood comes into contact with water, carbon monoxide is produced.Lukashenko explained.
In this way, the CO seeped into the atmosphere little by little and caused the strange phenomenon.
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Understanding the cause of the disease, the inhabitants of Kalachi were immediately evacuated so that the government could carry out the respective maintenance of that area.
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