It sounds benign, right? What’s so bad about nodding? You’d seem agreeable, optimistic. Alas,if you get real nodding syndrome, you probably starve, lose your wits, and die. You are probably under 15.
Reports of nodding syndrome first trickled out of eastern Africa in the 1960s. But a recent cluster of cases in southern Sudan has given the disorder a home on the globe. Thousands of kids from ages 5 to 15 are thought to be infected, or affected, or afflicted — the cause is a Total Mystery. So is the real number of kids affected.
The disease progression is not. A child begins “nodding,” [video] looking like she’s fighting to stay awake. The nodding may be accompanied by seizures.
Oddly, so oddly, seizures are most commonly triggered by feeling cold, and by the anticipation of eating — by seeing food. Curiously, they are not triggered by foods the child doesn’t recognize, like chocolate.
[Wild speculation alert:] So perhaps a brain circuit involved in motivating us to move toward food and other necessities is involved. If chocolate isn’t recognized as food, the motivation circuit will not activate.
This puts me in mind of the “mind control” gang of parasites:
Toxoplasma gondii causes a rat or mouse brain to be attracted to cat pee, which increases the parasite’s odds of being returned to its preferred host for a mating bout.
Larvae of some phorid flies eat enough of their host-ant’s brain that the ant’s body acts only as a living incubator.
Euhaplorchis Californiensis begins life as an egg in bird crap dropped in the water. It eventually enters a killifish through the gills, migrates to the brain, and causes the fish to surface and flap around until it’s eaten by… a bird.
You get the idea: Some parasites remodel the brain, and behavior, of their hosts to suit their own ends.
BUT nobody knows what causes nodding disease. Hypotheses include: exposure to wartime chemicals; exposure to the river blindness parasite; eating seeds treated with pesticides; eating monkeys; [add your guess here].
Nobody also knows: how long a kid typically lives after the syndrome sets in. Since the seizures and nodding start with feeding and stop when feeding stops, kids tend not to eat. The seizures can also result in falling, and serious injuries. The brain slowly shuts down. An MRI study of 10 kids found no smoking gun; EEG detected seizures in some brains. The guesstimate is three years.
You gotta admire the peeps who go study nodding kids, huh? It’s not a disease you’d want to bring back to your own offspring.
Now that I see it, I see it: When I sit down to eat with a stranger, or someone I hope to build a relationship with, I eat with caution. Am I eating too much? Too little? Too fast? I become conscious of my “feeding rate.”
