This Disease Turned 5 Million People Into Statues, And Then Vanished

in 1969 Beth Abraham Hospital in New York had a patient named Leonard Leonard had not left the hospital in 30 years he was one of a group of patients who had been there since before some of the nurses were even born and they all suffered from a mysterious illness that had swept the country in the early 20th century one that had left them in a in a catatonic State Frozen inside their own bodies like human statues nobody knew what was going on inside there were they conscious unconscious something in between or worst of all were they Wide Awake fully aware of what was going on around them and just unable to get their bodies to talk to their brains nobody knew then one day in March of 1969 Leonard and the others were going through their daily routines you know food cleaning medicine when the doctor came in with an oral medicine for each of them to drink now there was nothing unusual about this they were always tweaking their medicines and the doctors were always testing different things to try to help their condition um the nurses didn't even ask what it was it was so routine after leard got his medicine they wheeled him into the recck room where the other patients were sat around TVs and Stereos and whatnot and after staring blankly at the TV for about a half an hour or so Leonard woke up and he started to talk where had Leonard been this whole time what was this sleeping sickness that had put him in this state and what was the drug that got him out of it and the most important question could this happen again I have talked in multiple videos at this point about the beginning of the 20th century and how quickly things were changing and evolving it comes up a lot actually in fact I think I think I talked about it last week but it really was a crazy time I mean just think about how many things happened in just a couple of decades like people's homes got you know gas lines and then indoor plumbing and then electricity radio became a thing and then movies Cars were invented then airplanes World War I brought Untold Devastation and killed 20 million people then the Spanish Flu came through and killed 50 million more just to put that into perspective the global population was around 1.6 billion at the time so between World War I and the Spanish Flu nearly 5% of the world population was wiped away so if you knew more than 20 people you knew someone who died from one of those two things but just as things were settling down and the world began to recover and prepare for a great depression and an even bigger World War II somewhere in the middle of all that came one of the most bizarre and still unexplained Global pandemics of all time by the way I should point out that I actually did cover this topic in an episode of my Mysteries that human body series over on nebula um I'll go way more in depth on it in this video but yeah it was an episode on mysterious plague so if you want to know more stories like this you can go find them there it all started in the winter of 1916 in Europe when patients began showing up in hospitals complaining of an extreme malaise a total lack of energy and an overwhelming desire to sleep some showed other neurological symptoms as well like Tremors and palsies and hyperkinetic movements and in some extreme cases patients were in basically a catatonic State just almost comos unable to move or react to their environment luckily for most people the disease ran its course and they just kind of went on with their lives although there was some ongoing neurological damage we'll talk about that later but for an unfortunate few this became their permanent existence and more of these cases seem to pop up every day the disease got the attention of a doctor from the psychiatric neurological Clinic of the University of Vienna who had examined a handful of these patients with this disease and he was the first doctor to write a paper about it his name was Dr Constantine vonic cono which unbelievably isn't the name of a Marvel villain with the power to destroy the economy he wrote about it in a paper published in the journal V Clin Henri in 1917 that's the Vienna clinical weekly for you non-germans out there and in this paper he gave the disease a name en sephtis lethargica often shortened to just eel also known as sleeping sickness in the paper he broke down several different types of the disease because different patients present a little bit differently but because he was the first to published his name kind of stuck so in fact it's it's sometimes referred to as Von eono disease he was not the last person to publish on this disease though not by a long shot the French physician Renee cruset was treating patients in a military psychiatric facility and he published descriptions of the disease very soon after Von eono overall there'd be about 9,000 papers published by El by the mid 1920s British epidemiologist FG krook shank published a paper in 1918 that listed several other epidemics that looked a lot like eel in the past he pointed out Germany's kbal crank height in 1672 to 75 Rafia in Sweden in 1754 to 57 and the sweating sickness in England in 1485 e made its way to North America when the first case showed up in New York City on September 4th 1918 within a month three other cases were reported E spread quickly in the US during the last half of 1918 and by the spring of the next year it had been reported in 20 States the disease peaked worldwide in 1923 when 2,000 people in the US died from it and literally millions around the world were infected with it it's really about as close as you can imagine to a real life zombie outbreak hundreds of thousands of people lost the ability to walk talk function the disease spreading further and further with nothing short of global domination in sight and then around 1925 it just kind of stopped new cases stopped popping up except for a few you know here and there those that had it eventually overcame the disease went on with their lives the whole Affair was almost completely forgotten but a few things remained one the question of what caused it two the question of why it went away and three a small number of people who unfortunately just didn't get over it and remained in a catatonic limbo that went on for decades over the decades doctors studied these surviving patients looking for Clues to the diseases origin and pathology and while most of it does remain a mystery some patterns did emerge Dr vanon eono classified e into three forms ostatic a kinetic hyperkinetic and sopic the least common of these three is ostatic a kinetic in these cases people experience rigidity for extended periods but they are aware of what's happening just their movements are very slow as Dr vono wrote wrot quote to look at these patients one would suppose them to be in a state of profound secondary dementia emotions are scarcely noticeable in the face but they are mentally intact the hyperkinetic form presented with a manic phase at the beginning with involuntary jerky movements in their faces hips and shoulders and some vocalizations that's just the first phase after that they experienced fatigue restlessness and weakness which can last for several days and during this phase some of them experienc hallucinations and nerve pain in their faces and limbs but the most common form was the somol opop plgic type of VL its characteristics included confusion delirium and feelings of being in a dazed state other signs are cranial nerve paralysis and an overwhelming desire to sleep now one interesting link that did get made was between e and parkinsonism which a lot of patients developed after the epidemic Faded Away by the way parkinsonism is kind of a catchall term for any neurological condition that causes stiffness Tremors and slow movements so yeah a lot of these e patients would recover but then later develop this kind of parkinsonism where they become mentally and physically exhausted their limbs would become rigid their posture is bent and they're walking un steady all this would happen over the course of a few months now this isn't the same as say Parkinson's disease that presents way differently so doctors started to call it poentic parkinsonism or pep some of the differences between the two include pep occurs at any age Parkinson's occurs generally after age 50 P progresses rapidly and in spurts Parkinson's kind of steadily progresses over time and there's no sign of pill rolling Tremors in pep which you often see in Parkinson's pill rolling tremors are these movements that make it look like you're kind of rolling a pill between your finger and your thumb look out Matthew MCC the majority of cases showed up during the 1920s about 6 months to a year following the acute eel diagnosis now some studies suggest that the number of patients with parkinsonian symptoms actually tripled during this time since there were so many P cases in the 1920s and 30s many doctors believe the El caused parkinsonism some even thought that parkinsonism would Disappear Completely when the El generation died out that would have been nice but that's not what happened and many of them did die out over the years many from complications from E many from the parkinsonism but some just kept on going trapped in their faulty bodies year after year with no answer in sight so Jump Ahead to the 1960s where our story began where a small group of these survivors resided at The Chronic care facility in Beth Abraham Hospital in New York by the way just a reminder of the timeline here these patients had come down with this in the 20s it was now the 1960s so yeah four decades had passed then in 1966 a new doctor came to work with these patients a neurologist named Dr Oliver saxs he just completed a residency of neuropathology at UCL LA and was interested in exploring this and other neurological edge cases that he' read about when he first arrived on the word he described it like entering a museum or a wax work Gallery as he would later write in his book quote they would be conscious and aware yet not fully awake they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs totally liking energy impetus initiative motive appetite affect or desire they registered what went on about them without active attention and with profound indifference they neither conveyed nor felt the feeling of Life there were as insubstantial ghosts and passivist zombies he said there were motionless people fixed in strange positions and everything looked Frozen and that was kind of a characteristic of these patients like if you raised a person's arm in the air and let go they would just kind of hold it there until you you know moved it back down people basically just acted like posable figures they really were human statues then in early 1967 a new treatment became available to treat Parkinson's disease it was called levadopa or lopa it works by increasing the body's ability to produce the hormone dopamine which makes it possible for your brain to effectively transmit signals down neurop Pathways and that's one of the things that is one of the root causes of Parkinson's disease your body stops being able to produce new dopamine and it screws up the communication signals in the brain's motor cortex so L Doopa is a precursor to dopamine it's a chemical your body needs to make the dopamine so by giving Parkinson sufferers L Doopa it helps them to make more dopamine and that slows down the progression of Parkinson symptoms Sak described it as a kind of a nutrient that serves to replace missing dopamine um it's dopamine fertilizer if you will and since there's a documented connection between e and parkinsonism he started to wonder if maybe it would help with e patients too it took a couple of years to get access to the lopa and to get permission to actually tested on these patients but finally in March of 1969 he was able to get his hands on it and he administered the lopa to them and it worked the patients awakened and and acted normally these patients who had been catatonic or just straight up asleep for 40 years suddenly came life they were conscious they were coherent they were able to move and walk and play throw balls to each other it was like a literal Miracle now obviously a lot of these guys were super excited to be back to their normal lives but some actually didn't handle it very well they they they would turn violent or regressed out of this transformation they would go back into their sleepiness State as Oliver Sachs told fresh air in 1985 quote they were coming too and they were being awakened and animated but often in a vacuum often to a world which no longer made any sense for them which had no place for them in which they no longer had relatives friends or anything I mean think about it when these guys went into this state Charles Lindberg hadn't crossed the Atlantic yet and just months after they woke up we landed on the moon many of them would look in the mirror and be confused by this old person staring back at them and of course the music and the fashion were bizarre and confusing to them have I been asleep this whole time unfortunately after several months of being awake and experiencing life and getting to be alive again the elopa started to wear off each dose produced you know diminishing returns and eventually they stopped responding to it altogether and they all returned to their catatonic State now if this whole story sounds familiar it's because Oliver Sach wrote a book about it called Awakenings and that of course was turned into an Oscar winning movie staring Robert dairo and Robin Williams next year will actually Mark a hundred years since the end of the en sephtis lethargica epidemic and we still really have no clear idea what caused it but we do have some theories traditionally theories have fallen into two main categories toxical and infectious and a third one has actually popped up in recent years but I'll get to that in a minute toxicological obviously means caused by an external toxin of some kind um for example in England for a while there it was thought that it was maybe caused by botulism or solanine that can collect in potato Sprouts now Dr vono actually ruled out toxic causes like food poisoning early on because none of the patients had any gastrointestinal issues he also ruled out typhoid polio syphilis and poison gas but what he did notice was that all the patients had flu like symptoms and since they were still coming out of the great influenza pandemic he thought maybe it was an intis created by the flu like a an influenza sephtis and there were previous instances of el associated with flu epidemics unfortunately studies showed that the brains of people who died from an influenza and sephtis had significant neuropathological differences than those who died from eel but Dr Von eono still believed that an infectious virus caused a yell now there have been various studies that both prove and deny uh the influenza Theory so it's it it's never been proven but that would also explain why the disease suddenly went away about the same time as the influenza pandemic ended but I did mention a third Theory or hypothesis earlier and that one was proposed in the early 2000s it suggests that it was caused by a post-infectious autoimmune disorder for specifically the hyperkinetic form researchers proposed antibodies against nmda receptors without getting two in the weeds nmda is a receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamine it stands for n methyl d aspartate and it helps with neuroplasticity so the idea is that the body is creating antibodies that are then attacking nmda receptors which kind of short circuits the brain this hypothesis was put forth by Russell Dale a pediatric neurologist working in the UK in 2003 he was actually working with some e patients which by the way plot twist um there are still some cases that pop up here and there today uh but he was working with around 20 patients or so when he noticed that more than half of them had experienced a sore throat caused by a rare form of strep just before they started suffering from E and yeah Test shows that in MDA antibodies were elevated in those patients so he hypothesized that these antibodies may have mistakenly attacked the basil ganglia neurons the problem is that studies that were performed during the original epidemic showed abnormalities in other parts of the brain like the cerebral cortex later in 2012 another study proposed that e could be caused by an inovirus uh maybe even the polio virus Intero viruses are made of RNA and protein and they can enter the body through the gastrointestinal tract before attacking the nervous system they can also spread through the air and uncontaminated surfaces anyway the 2012 study showed viruslike part par in the cytoplasm nuclei of midbrain neurons and all classical e cases studied they also found larger virus-like particles in modern e cases it should be noted that none of them were influenza particles and while it is considered a well- conducted survey its results have not been replicated and that basically gets us caught up to today um again lots of theories not a whole lot of answers it might be easy to dismiss um inphy lethargica is just a weird medical mystery from 100 years ago but I think that'll be a mistake I after all as I just pointed out there are still cases that pop up from time to time just not in the epidemic numbers that we saw way back then although that might not be the case anymore yeah perhaps you've noticed we've had a bit of a global pandemic ourselves in the last few years and uh yeah we're finding an alarming trend of post-pandemic symptoms that are eerily similar to the El epidemic according to the CDC 6% of the US adult population is experiencing long covid symptoms that's actually down from previous years which is a good thing but that's still nearly 20 million people long Co symptoms can range from lingering loss of smell and taste to extreme fatigue and mental fog according to a recent study 26.4% of covid long haulers report significant complications in their ability to perform daily activities now I I should say right up front long covid is not the same as eel uh there's no unresponsive human statues this time around and the symptoms are a lot more nebulous in fact the Lancet published a paper in 2021 that found U over 200 symptoms across organ systems uh in people who experience long Co some research suggest that microclots that form around inflammatory molecules might obstruct oxygen flow into cells and that would be why some long covid patients feel tired have brain fog or can't breathe well another theory is that covid-19 might uh disrupt a mitochondrial function which makes someone feel tired or have brain fog but there are parallels to draw here um not just because it was spurred on by a pandemic but because some of these nebula symptoms I'm talking about are neurological and it's important for us to get to the bottom of how viral infections can affect the nervous system even years after the epidemic Peaks or as Dr hadidi mji of the UK National Hospital for neurology said quote let me emphasize that many of these pandemic triggering pathogens whether directly or indirectly exact a toll on the hum nervous system these effects often evade timely diagnosis but have potential to inflict significant disability and prolonged suffering it's going to take a really long time to really understand the ripples that the co pandemic put into the world um it's kind of impossible to see it from where we're standing right now at this place in history in fact if the sleeping sickness teaches us anything it's that some of the downstream effects never fully get figured out out of the tens of millions of people infected by the Spanish Flu a small percentage developed eel and of those a tiny percentage never fully recovered it's possible that the same could be true with long covid and the 40 years from now a small number of long covid sufferers are still bedridden hoping for a miraculous cure my God I hope not for anybody out there who's dealing with long covid symptoms my heart goes out to you I wish you the best and know that long covid is not eel uh don't don't let this video freak you out too much totally different things you know researching this video has also made me wonder if there's some kind of connection with chronic fatigue syndrome um you know something else that's been around that includes extreme tiredness in people for long periods I couldn't find anything about it but I I I still wonder if there's something there but there are a lot of unexplained epidemics like this throughout history like I said I cover some of those in my Mysteries of the human body series over on nebula I encourage you to go uh check that out and maybe while you're watching it you can curl up on the couch with a delicious dinner from today's sponsor Factor so it occurred to me that many of 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 2,036,535

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: tib0lgpjbu8

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2024