Mystery epidemics

I was very interested to read ‘Sleepy Hollow’, your report on the village of Kalachi in Kazakhstan [ FT329:10-11]. Kalachi is not the first place to suffer from a mysterious recurring illness that seems to have no rational cause. In the 1950s the authorities of the Bulgarian Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare became aware of a mysterious disease called Balkan nethropathy. In the country’s north-west foothills of the Balkan Mountains, small villages were suffering from a statistically alarming outbreak of renal failure.

When The Ghost Disease by Michael Howell and Peter Ford was published by Penguin Books in 1986, there was still no known cause. Diet, living conditions and family medical histories revealed only that it was confined to the area. If you grew up and moved elsewhere you died from the nethropathy; if your parents moved out of the area before you were born, you were healthy even though they might die. The most notable symptom was an ochre colouring of the skin, particularly the hands and soles of the feet. Blood transfusions helped allay the symptoms but did not cure the disease. In 2014 New Scientist magazine reported that no cause or cure for the disease has been found.

In 1965 the English town of Epping suffered an outbreak of jaundice that puzzled health officials but was eventually tracked down to contaminated flour. Then there is the disease kuru, which was found to be caused, not by sorcery as the Fore people of the New Guinea highlands thought, but by the practice of ritual cannibalism and the eating of the brains of people suffering from the disease. It turned out to be a form of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.

It would be interesting to read about any other instances of mysterious diseases confined to particular areas and with no known cause. Margaret Pitcher Warramanga, Australian Capital Territory