Officials Are Evacuating the City in Kazakhstan Where Villagers Fall Asleep At Random

Over the past few months, the town of Kalachi, Kazakhstan, has suffered yet another round of the mystery illness that causes its villagers to fall asleep at random for no apparent reason. The problem was first reported in 2010, and government officials—perhaps spurred on by a recent burst of international attention as well as the scale of the latest flare-up—have finally upped their efforts to get to the root of the bizarre plague. At least two other towns nearby have reported similar symptoms from their residents.

Lead doctors now claim that they may have discovered the source of the epidemic. But their findings seem weak by toxicology standards and are far from the conclusive closure locals need. So with a lack of any real cure, local authorities have just started evacuating Kalachi en masse, hoping that getting people out of the town will just eliminate the illness wholesale.

As of the last outbreak from August to September 2014, about 60 people (10 percent of Kalachi's population) had fallen asleep for days on end. A sudden wave in late December 2014 added over 30 more victims (including one non-local, a visiting Russian retiree) to the count. By the end of January, the overall number of victims had reached 126—not including one cat supposedly affected as well—doubling the affliction's toll to 20 percent of the local population. Among these latest victims was the village's administrator, Asel Sadvakasova. The scale of this outbreak led Kazakhstani Deputy Prime Minister Berdibek Saparbaev to officially call upon foreign medical institutions to help local doctors find the source of the illness and figure out exactly what the hell is going on.

By early February, Professor Leonid Rikhvanov of Tomsk Polytechnic University in Siberia, who'd been following the Kalachi story for some time, answered this call, claiming in international media outlets like the Daily Mail that he could explain the entire affair. The culprit, he said, was the unusually high level of radon gas emitting naturally from nearby uranium mines.

Yet this hypothesis had already been rejected (very early on in the disease's history). And about a week after Rikhvanov made his claim, Sergei Lukashenko, the director of Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center's Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute, dismissed the radon idea, saying the conditions on the ground didn't match. He also noted that Rikhvanov had never even visited Kalachi, so he had very little evidence upon which to base his claims.

Lukashenko believes the illness has something to do with carbon monoxide leaks, which his agency noted in mid-January they had measured in concentrations up to ten times above nationally acceptable levels in recent regional tests. Kazakhstan's Health Ministry seems to be on board with Lukashenko's theory, declaring around the same time that they had preliminarily connected the condition's symptoms to vapor accumulations in poorly ventilated homes.

"Carbon monoxide is definitely a factor," the Siberian Times quoted Lukashenko as saying. "But I can't tell you whether this is the main and vital factor. The question is why it does not go away. We have some suspicions as the village has a peculiar location and weather patterns frequently force chimney smoke to go down instead of up."

Carbon monoxide has been a favorite culprit for amateurs following the story, so for many Lukashenko's claims will come as a moment of intense validation. Yet this conclusion still feels incomplete as it doesn't describe the conditions of the illness in Kalachi all that well. Many fall asleep suddenly, with no prior symptoms, outside of the homes where leaks occur. And when a batch of four patients were taken to the national capital of Astana for the first time for examination at some of the nation's premiere medical facilities, tests found no traces of external factors that could have influenced their health and caused their current condition.

http://www.vice.com/read/officials-are-evacuating-the-city-in-kazakhstan-where-villagers-fall-asleep-at-random-127