Mystery Disease Terrifies Sudan Officials

Martha Halim is stricken with mysterious seizures that frighten her from eating. Her parents have tried everything to diagnose the ailment. She's been to a hospital, she's seen a Western doctor and she's taken anti-epileptic drugs.

Martha suffers from a strange affliction called "nodding syndrome," apparently unique to southern Sudan...The affliction, which has been found in about 300 children so far, baffles experts. The World Health Organization began investigating it about two years ago...

Peter Spencer, an American neurotoxicologist who has investigated the condition for WHO, encountered another 13-year-old girl with a bizarre variation of the illness.
"I was able to demonstrate with her that she was a regular nodder with local food and by contrast she did not nod when eating a variety of American food..

Experts say a few children recover....Unraveling the mystery of nodding syndrome is a question of money and time, Spencer said."If we're smart, we will unravel it. We won't let it burn on like we did HIV...

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20040128_996.html

I am glad its getting more press though. We can't go on ignoring strange diseases in "far away lands" like this, the next one might be worse than AIDS.

and have the highest respect for him. He's one of the top people in this field, and a tenacious, imaginative investigator. It's good to see him on this.

snip> from the article

Spencer said one theory that cannot be ruled out, although it is not a leading suspicion, is the disease could have come from eating monkeys. Ebola can be spread to humans by chimpanzees. AIDS also made its way from primates to humans.

snip>

Oh Really? Sounds like they have been experimenting with some sick sh** in Sudan. What natural resources does Sudan have? Just curious if anyone knows



http://mediafilter.org/MFF/caq/CAQ58TrackGenocide.html

AIDS has an uncanny knack for attacking people the dominant society considers "undesirables": gays,injection drug users (IDUs), prisoners, and people of color. The commonly cited US statistic that African Americans have twice the AIDS rate as white Americans understates the problem because it is based on the total number of cases since 1981. While white gay men constituted the large majority of cases in the early days, by the early 1990s the rate of new cases among Latinos was 2.5 times higher than among whites, and the black/ white ratio was even starker at 5-1 for men and 15-1 for women. By 1993, AIDS had become the leading cause of death among African Americans between the ages of 25 and 44. Internationally, the racial disparity is even worse: About 80 percent of the world's 9 million AIDS deaths through 1995 have occurred in Africa, where 2 million children have already been orphaned.
AN ALMOST PERFECT FIT
The correlation between AIDS and social and economic oppression is clear and powerful. What is more, the pattern meshes neatly with an extensive history of chemical and biological warfare (CBW) and medical experiments which have targeted people of color, Third World populations, prisoners, and other unsuspecting individuals. In the first North American example of
CBW, early European settlers used smallpox-infected blankets as a weapon of genocide against Native Americans. A few centuries later, the US Army conducted hundreds of tests that released "harmless" bacteria, viruses, and other agents in populated areas; one was to determine how a fungal agent thought mainly to affect black people would spread. Washington also subsidized the pre-marketing tests of birth control pills before a safe dosage was determined on Puerto Rican and Haitian women who were not warned of the potentially severe side effects. Since the 1940s, the US has conducted 154 tests on 9,000 people soldiers, mental patients, prisoners many of whom had no idea of the risks involved. On another level, the

> "I was able to demonstrate with her that she was a regular nodder
> with local food and by contrast she did not nod when eating a
> variety of American food..

Withdrawal symptoms from GM ingredients?

Junk-food dependency?

MSG?

Regardless of the cause, no one will care for about eight years or
so - until it hits enough people in the US that the administration
is forced to take notice.

(Mind you, I think it has already taken hold in the UK government ...)

Nihil