Plagues,
Pestilences and Diseases
Africa: Mysterious 'Nodding disease' confounds experts,
kills children
By Max Delany | AFP News
Patrick Anywar, 14, lies curled up naked in the dust and midday
heat of a Ugandan village, struggling to look up at his younger
brother and sister playing in front of the family home.
After a minute's effort to face his siblings, Anywar's head slumps
onto his chest and his emaciated body is gripped by convulsions.
Anywar is one of more than 3,000 children in northern Uganda who
are suffering from a debilitating mystery ailment known as nodding
disease, which has touched almost every family in the village of
Tumangu.
For several years, scientists have tried and failed to determine
the cause of the illness, which locals say has killed hundreds of
youngsters.
What they do know is that the disease affects only children and
gradually devastates its victims through debilitating seizures,
stunted growth, wasted limbs, mental disabilities and sometimes
starvation.
Anywar's mother, Rugina Abwoyo, has already lost one son, named
Watmon, to the disease in 2010. Now she says she can do little but
watch on helplessly as another child slips away.
"Before he was walking and running like other children, but now
someone always has to stay home to look after him," Abwoyo told
AFP. "The disease is terrible -- it does not let him drink or eat
by himself."
Walking along footpaths cut through the sorghum plantations, Joe
Otto, a volunteer health worker, explains how nodding disease has
ravaged Tumangu, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) north of the
capital Kampala.
"There are 780 people living in this village and we have 97 cases
of the disease. It has affected almost every family," Otto, 54,
told AFP.
Whenever sporadic deliveries of medicine arrive at the local
health centre several kilometres away, Otto pedals his bicycle to
fetch the drugs. But he knows that they only offer a short-term
solution.
"We are giving out drugs for epilepsy, like carbamazepine, but
this disease is different from epilepsy," Otto said.
Instead, as the disease has torn through their community, local
residents have moved from fear to a grim acceptance, Otto says.
"We started saying that the patient who had died was the one who
had been cured, because finally they were at rest from this
painful disease," Otto said.
Scientists are trying to find a cure: since 2010, researchers
ranging from epidemiologists to environmental experts,
neurologists, toxicologists and psychiatrists have carried out a
range of tests.
Investigations have looked at possible links between the disease
and everything from a parasite that causes river blindness, to
malnutrition and the after-effects of a civil war that ravaged
northern Uganda for decades.
"We looked at all this, but unfortunately we were not able to
pinpoint any significant contributing or risk factors," said
Miriam Nanyunja, disease control and prevention officer at the
World Health Organisation in Kampala.
"The search for the causative agent is still ongoing," she added.
Often the results have thrown up more questions than answers.
Scientists do not know if the disease is linked to similar
outbreaks in neighbouring South Sudan and Tanzania.
Efforts continue to understand if the disease is still spreading
or has peaked -- and why it is seems confined only to certain
communities.
Last month, after pressure from lawmakers from affected areas,
Uganda's health ministry produced an emergency response plan to
try to identify and control the disease.
However, Nanyunja says that while the search for the cause and a
possible cure goes on, for now, doctors can only focus on trying
to alleviate the symptoms.
"There are many diseases that we continue to treat
symptomatically, without knowing the exact cause," Nanyunja said.
But for Patrick Anywar, any attempts to curb or cure the disease
may come too late.
"We are hoping that the doctors work very hard to get the cure for
this disease," his mother Abwoyo says.
"There is no future for us as so many children have already been
affected, but we hope that our youngest can be saved."