Two more residents of Kazakhstan's Kalachi village contract mysterious 'sleepy' sickness
KOKSHETAU. March 3 (Interfax) - Another two residents of the village of Kalachi in Kazakhstan's Akmola region have developed symptoms of a mysterious 'sleepy' sickness.
"Another two persons turned for medical help last night. The latest total number of [recorded] occurrences [of the] disease has reached nine since Sunday," chief physician of the Yesil district hospital Kabdrashit Almagambetov told Interfax on Tuesday.
Kalachi residents started to complain of drowsiness, loss of memory and hallucinations in March 2013. All of them were diagnosed with encephalopathy of an unknown origin.
Thousands of tests were carried out but the origin of the disease remained unidentified.
The village of Kalachi, which has a population of 680, is part of the Krasnogorsky rural district. It is located 600 meters from the former urban-type settlement of Krasnogorsk - which had a population of 6,500, most of whom were miners. Nowadays the town is called Krasnogorsky and its population has shrunk to 130. The town was operated by an ore mining department of the former Soviet Union and uranium ore was mined there from the 1960s to the 1990s. Uranium production there ceased in 1991-1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union. The mines were shut down and the land was reclaimed.