Thread: Africa's Walking Dead: Mystery Horrific Nodding Disease turns Children into Zombies

Africa's walking dead: Mystery of horrific 'nodding' disease that turns children into zombies

• Illness has baffled experts from the World Health Organisation

By Suzannah Hills
UPDATED: 08:12 EST, 27 March 2012

A mystery disease is turning an increasing number of children in east Africa into zombies.

The condition, known by locals as the 'nodding disease', drastically alters children's personalities by making them withdrawn and confused.

One of the first symptoms of the illness, affecting children in northern Uganda, Sudan and Tanzania, is that children appear to be falling asleep - their eyes close and head droops, even though they may not be tired.




Many children suffering from the nodding disease die from malnutrition because they won't eat




Children suffering from the condition are withdrawn and have no interest in eating


The condition gets progressively worse and can cause affected children, generally aged between five and 15, to fall and injure themselves

Many die by losing consciousness and have horrific accidents, like falling into a cooking fire or drowning.

Other symptoms include losing cognitive ability and experiencing stunted growth.

Some suffer epilepsy-like seizures and struggle to eat - becoming shells of their former selves.

Others die of infections because they are weak or malnourished.



Some children with nodding disease are abandoned by their families because they are too difficult to look after



In northern Uganda alone, 3,000 children have the illness, but numerous cases have also been reported in Sudan and Tanzania


One mother in northern Uganda, Grace Lagat, where 3,000 children have the illness, told CNN how her two children have been affected by the nodding disease.

She said they suffer from seizures and after each attack are less like the children she remembers.

Speaking about her 13-year-old daughter Pauline, she told CNN: 'Her personality has changed greatly from before.


'She was normal when she was born. Now she just moves around and serves no purpose.'

The seizures are triggered in strange ways, say community members, such as when unfamiliar food is brought to the children or when the weather changes.


Pauline Oto, who has the nodding disease, still wears her faded yellow and green school dress but hasn't been to school for years because she can no longer write or understand what goes on in her lessons



Grace Lagat, from northern Uganda, is forced to tie her two children up whenever she leaves her home to stop them wandering off


There are other bizarre symptoms with the children often wandering off by themselves and getting lost in the bush.

Other children have started fires, according to parents and medics in the field, while some appear confused and traumatized.

Lagat now has to tie up her children when she leaves the house to stop them from disappearing.

She told the TV station:'When I am going to the garden, I tie them with cloth.

'If I don't tie them I come back and find that they have disappeared.'



Parents have reported their children suffer seizures and are more withdrawn after each episode



Medical experts by confounded by the condition and there is still no known cause or cure


The condition first came to the attention of Ugandan authorities in 2009 and has confounded officials with the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Saweka and the Ugandan government mobilized teams from WHO, CDC, and local health teams but there is still no known cause or cure for the disease.

Doctors are using drugs for controlling epilepsy with some limited success but they say it only slows the progression of symptoms.

CNN Video at the link

Mystery of nodding disease turning children into 'zombies' in Uganda | Mail Online

ya might want to see if these children were given shots by the depopulation wizard Bill Gates or Obama's depopulation Czar

Good grief, that's awful.

Mysterious ‘zombie’ disease afflicts thousands of Ugandan children

By David Ferguson
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 12:52 EDT



Agnes Apio has to tie up her son Francis before she can leave the house. In his state, he is a danger to himself. Where once he walked and talked like a normal child, now he is only able to drag himself along in the dirt. Francis is suffering from “Nodding Disease,” a brain disorder that, according to CNN, afflicts at least 3,000 children in northern Uganda, leaving them physically stunted and severely mentally disabled.

“I feel dark in my heart,” Apio says as waves flies away from her son’s face and mops up his urine after a seizure, “This boy has become nothing.”

“Reportedly the children gnaw at their fabric restraints, like a rabid animals,” says The Daily Tech. The article calls them “zombie children,” having “no cure” and “no future.”

First the victims become restless, can’t concentrate. They say they have trouble thinking. Then comes the nodding, an uncontrollable dipping of the head that presages the disease’s debilitating epilepsy-like seizures. It is this nodding motion that gives the illness its name.

Nodding Disease first attacks the nervous system, then the brain. As the epilepsy-like seizures progress and worsen, the children become less and less like themselves, and more and more distant and blank. Eventually the brain stops developing and the victims’ bodies stop growing. So far, no patients have recovered.

Grace Lagat also has to tie up her children in order to leave the house. Daughter Pauline, 13, and son Thomas are bound hand and foot to keep them from shuffling away and getting lost. Pauline recently disappeared for five days.

Experts are baffled as to what causes the disease, which only occurs in children. Early findings suggest a confluence of the presence of the black fly-borne parasitic worm Onchocerca Volvulus, which causes river blindness, and acute vitamin B6 deficiency.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, onset usually takes place at the age of five or six and progresses rapidly, leaving the victims severely mentally and physically handicapped within a couple of years.

Victims can wander off and disappear. Some 200 “secondary deaths” have been blamed on fires and accidents caused by children with the disease.


Physicians and workers with the Ugandan Red Cross are frustrated by what they see as a lack of urgency in the government’s handling of the disease. After months of lagging, officials have only begun an official tally of cases within the last two weeks.

The situation was already dire when a team from the World Health Organization visited northern Uganda in 2009. CNN quotes one doctor from the team, Dr. Joaquin Saweka as saying, “It was quite desperate, I can tell you. Imagine being surrounded by 26 children and 12 of them showing signs of this. The attitude was to quickly find a solution to the problem.”

Solutions, however, have been slow in coming.

Doctors have been treating the seizures caused by the disease with epilepsy drugs, but their efficacy is limited. The drugs only slow the progression of the disease, but fail to stop it.

Currently, Ugandan government officials say that they are doing everything they can to fight the epidemic. They say that new epilepsy drugs are being tried and special training has been instituted for local health officials. This, they say, is as much as can be done for a disease whose cause and cure are largely unknown.

Saweka said, “When you know the root cause, you address the cure. Now you are just relieving the symptoms. We don’t expect to cure anybody.”

Watch a CDC video about Nodding Disease, embedded via YouTube, below:



Mysterious ‘zombie’ disease afflicts thousands of Ugandan children | The Raw Story