In parts of Eastern Africa tike in some community have been afflicted by a mysterious condition . When fall in food or experiencing tear of dusty atmospheric condition , they are strike by a strange soma of epilepsy that makes the kid uncontrollably nod their heading . Known as“nodding syndrome ” , the condition eventually gets bad , with the kid suffer more austere seizures leading to disability and occasionally end .
Over a 23 twelvemonth period from 1990 to 2013 , thousands of children suddenly came down with the condition in South Sudan and Uganda , leading a team of researcher to take up look into the cause of the syndrome . It turns outthat this strange form of epilepsy may be down to a parasitic louse common in the region , and the cause of another prevalent disease .
have intercourse scientifically asOnchocerca volvulus , the nematode worm is usually associate with the neglected tropic disease , river blindness . Found chiefly in sub - Saharan Africa , it is thought that up to120 million peopleare at risk from the disease , which is unfold by the bite of the black tent-fly in which the worm pass half its biography cycle . It tends to cause austere itching of the skin , development of bumps under the skin , and can eventually lead to a node of the cornea that cause blindness .
Now , in a new newspaper issue inScience Translational Medicine , researchers suggest that it could also be responsible for nodding syndrome , by over - get the resistant system that then attacks the nerve cell . They are careful to take down that they have not establish that this is the case , but they come up grounds that those with the syndrome were much more likely to have a particular antibody that targets a protein called leiomodin-1 .
This protein is found in smooth muscle and thyroid cells , but it is also present in genius tissue and the nervous scheme . But more significantly , italso nearly resemblesother proteins typically found on the surface ofO. volvulusnematodes . The researchers suspect that the immune system of rules may have originally been establish an approach against the worm , but then got confused and mistook the protein on the body ’s own neuron for the parasite .
The slip closely resemble another situation seen in Tanzania , where in the sixties doctors suggested that children know epileptic seizures and nodding symptom may well have been related to the presence of river sightlessness .
This means that the orphic nodding illness could , in possibility , be well treat by ridding the children of the nematode , which should also stop the seizure . There has been a push for the treatment of river sightlessness to be expand , which is accomplish using the drug ivermectin , something that theCarter Centeris now puzzle out towards .
