In a cold spring morning in 2010, dull life of people in
Krasnogorsk, a town in northwestern Kazakhstan, was troubled by an
incident that would change the entire local community life.
Lyubov Belkova, who friends call Lyuba for short, had
finished first as usual, and walked back to her stall by the entrance. Someone
asked Lyuba a question. When no answer came, the women looked over to notice
the plump, middle-aged woman slumped in her seat, head down on her table of
socks and hats.
“Lyuba? Lyuba?” They called. No response. Nadezhda, a former
nurse, hurried over. She tapped her lightly — nothing. She checked Lyuba’s
pulse — it was normal. She checked her pupils — they were dilated. “Call the
ambulance,” she commanded. Then she noticed Lyuba was snoring.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to wake his family decided
that we need to see doctors. Lyuba was not awake until four days without to be
able to remember anything of what happened to her during this period.
When she tried to get out of bed to find that it no longer
feels legs from the knees down. "I thought it would not be mine!" was
her thought. After a few minutes and fully recovered. She got one out of bed
and was walking without any help hospital halls.
The little group healthcare in the area of relieved,
thinking it was just one of those isolated incidents which can not be
explained, but that science is unable to investigate very thoroughly because
its impact is minimal and the human, financial and time resources must
judicious use. But it would be not so!
For the next month,
Lyuba was emotional, she was weepy. Sometimes her granddaughter told her she
had become aggressive. Lyuba complained of dizzy spells. She had headaches. She
had to write everything down so as not to forget. Scraps of paper littered her
kitchen windowsill: “Turn off water,” “Buy milk,”
“Take medication.” Lyuba was
confused by all this; then again, at 61, she was getting older, maybe this was
normal. Poor Lyuba, the townspeople told each other, but Krasnogorsk had
been a Soviet uranium mining town — they’d seen far worse.
A few weeks after Lyuba, Nadezhda, the nurse from the
market, went to bed one night, and the next morning her mother couldn’t wake
her. She was snoring heavily. When she woke up a few days later, the doctors
told her they couldn’t find anything wrong with her, she was probably
overworked. She needed to rest more. She thought that made sense. Life had been
hard in Krasnogorsk since the Soviet Union
collapsed. Nadezhda had been tired for decades. Poor
Nadezhda, everyone said, life hadn’t been easy for her.
For the next two years, Lyuba would be in and out of the
hospital six more times with the same symptoms. She lived with a packed bag —
underwear, robe, slippers — of everything she would need. Lyuba kept all her
medical charts in a thick baby-blue folder. Doctors had written all kinds of
things she didn’t understand: “signs of postischemic alterations of the basal
ganglia,” “ischemic stroke,” “stenocardia,” “cerebral atrophy,” and
“substitutive external hydrocephalus.” She had traveled to Russia for more
tests. The hospital there did MRIs, EKGs, and body scans; they checked her
thyroid. She trudged around for days with a machine the size of a large purse
that logged her vitals. In the end, they told her she had second-grade
circulatory encephalopathy and cerebral obliterating atherosclerosis, and they
didn’t exclude the possibility of epilepsy. Her gait had turned jerky, she
complained of headaches, she was always so emotional. She knew people were
gossiping that there was something funny about her. Poor Lyuba, they
said to each other, so many strokes, how is she still alive?
In March 2013, the townspeople gathered in the neighboring village of Kalachi to celebrate the spring festival
of Nauryz. They watched their children perform traditional Kazakh dances, sing
songs, and recite poems in the village’s playground. After a few hours, they
settled into the bar next door for the evening, drinking into the night. Over
the long weekend, three college-age kids and five adults fell ill with the same
symptoms. First they would slur their words, as if they were drunk. They would
see double, and start swaying, then they would fall asleep and snore heavily.
They could be roused, speak, go to the bathroom, even eat food, but then they
would fall back asleep. They stayed in this state for days. When they finally
woke up, they didn’t remember anything. The villagers didn’t understand what
was wrong. Maybe the kids had been doing drugs, they told each
other,maybe the adults drank too much. But it didn’t add up.
That’s when the townspeople remembered Lyuba and Nadezhda.
They remembered another woman who worked in a shop across the street from the
market, who fell ill a few weeks after Nadezhda. She snored and couldn’t be
woken for days either. Someone mentioned Bogdan — the high school senior who
had come home from school and fallen on the carpet around the same time as
Lyuba. Bogdan had been active in his illness, verging on violent. He kept
trying to run somewhere and had to be tied down to the hospital bed. He was out
for nine days. He didn’t remember anything either. Drugs, the town rumor
mill had churned, maybe he drank something. It wouldn’t be the first time
homemade brew had gone wrong. Teenagers, they had tutted.
They remembered Julia, a shop attendant who had gone across
the street to the bakery in Kalachi a few months before Nauryz. After she came
back, she took off her jacket and sat down, but when she tried to stand again,
she couldn’t. She tried to speak, but her speech was slurred, as if she’d
chugged a bottle of vodka on her morning bread run. She was ill for three days.
When she woke up, the doctors told her she had overexerted herself. She needed
to rest more. But Julia was 28 and she wasn’t particularly tired. The doctors said
there was something wrong with her spine. After that, Julia was fired from her
job; the proprietor didn’t want a liability. Poor Julia, people had
said at the time.
Just as they were slowly connecting the dots, the residents
of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk started getting sick en masse. It came like a
biblical plague exacting revenge on all those people who had tutted poor
Lyuba, poor Nadezhda, poor Julia. There would be nine waves of sleeping
sickness in total — no street would be spared — over 130 people, a quarter of
the total population, some multiple times. Everyone would exhibit similar
symptoms: the slurred speech, the swaying, and the double vision. When they
woke up, they remembered nothing. Everyone was getting the same diagnosis:
encephalopathy of unknown origin, basically abnormal brain function of no known
cause.
Scientists arrived with sample baggies and metal machines;
then came local government officials in suits with clipboards and surveys about
relocation. Journalists swarmed. People kept getting sick. No one knew why or
what to do about it. And — despite
reports this
summer that a possible explanation has been discovered — they still don’t.
At first, suspicion turned on the uranium mine two miles
away. The complex lies in shattered ruin on the horizon as a constant reminder
of the town’s former glory. When I arrived in late April, there was little to
welcome visitors. A gated cemetery on the side of the road and a lone landmark
heralded our approach, proclaiming “Krasnogorsk” in neat red letters with a red
jackhammer and helmet on a white inverted triangle. Beyond the stump,
Krasnogorsk’s tall apartment blocs rise out of the flat golden steppe, as if
they had been air-dropped there directly from Moscow — separated from the squat, ramshackle
farmhouses of Kalachi by a small ravine that serves as the natural boundary
between town and village.
Everyone who saw Krasnogorsk for the first time was jealous
of its beauty and its bounty. The town had two schools, a large, gleaming
hospital, and a theater that could hold 420 people. They had running water,
electricity, and central heat, unlike their village neighbors in Kalachi, who
carted well water, used chimneys, and kept livestock. The miners got extra
rations of milk or sour cream. In the summer, everyone gathered at the Ishim, a river so clean people could see their toes
wiggle when they swam in it. They would fish for carp and tench and barbecue it
on the sandy banks. Miners had summer cottages with small vegetable gardens.
They had so much, Krasnogorsk looked down on the 600 villagers of Kalachi. Why
wouldn’t they? They even instituted a coupon system to prevent the villagers
from buying their fancy town food. When the mine ran out of uranium in 1980,
they sealed it and opened a new one 30 miles away.
It was in this atmosphere of uncertainty that people started
getting the sleeping sickness. So when doctors said it happened because they
were overworked, everyone believed them. Why wouldn’t they? If the residents of
Krasnogorsk and Kalachi were exhausted, they had plenty of reasons to be.
From the beginning there were lots of theories. Maybe the
wind was bringing something from the mine. Maybe it was coming out of the
earth. Or maybe it was the changing seasons. People told each other to open the
windows, they told each other to close the windows, but it didn’t seem to
matter. Whatever it was, it was coming fast.
There were days when multiple people on a single street fell
sick. There were days when people on opposite ends of the town fell sick
simultaneously. The men were usually more active, verging on violent, and had
to be restrained. Women were calmer in their slumber. Yet each could be woken
up, spoken to, fed — smokers even went out for cigarettes — before falling back
asleep. A cluster of people could be in the same place and only some of them
would fall asleep. Why? they asked each other.
Kazakhstan’s
National Nuclear
Center’s Institute
of Radiation Safety and Ecology was
dispatched from its base in Kurchatov, northeastern Kazakhstan, for a month in April
2014. The team measured radon levels, though radon causes lung cancer, not
drowsiness. They tested the ground, the air, the water, and food — tomatoes,
potatoes, and cucumbers were put into plastic bags. Radon levels were high, but
no higher than one would expect from a town and village practically on top of a
uranium mine, so they ruled it out. They turned their attention to carbon
monoxide.
But nothing was conclusive, so people kept talking. Maybe
the village of Kalachi would be resettled like their
neighbors in Krasnogorsk. Maybe the village school would be closed. Rumors
stretched like shadows at dusk. A man swore he had seen people burying barrels
in shafts when they were closing the mine. Someone else said the government had
found gold under the town and wanted them out, so they were being poisoned.
Maybe the government wanted to make the city a closed military zone, or a
resort for the wealthy. Perhaps they found holy water; maybe it was diamonds.
Residents started noticing helicopters flying overhead — could they be spraying
something? People saw ghosts. One woman saw UFOs, small red and blue orbs that
hung a few feet above the earth; others swore they’d seen them too.
Curiously, people also noticed that while visiting relatives
from Russia and Astana, the
capital of Kazakhstan,
fell sick, no official outsider ever did — not the journalists, not the
scientists, not the parade of local government officials who came to the
village meetings with their empty promises. “How can you explain that?”, they
asked each other. Surely this is evidence the government is poisoning us.
There was the truck driver who got sick while fishing and
nearly fell into the once-pristine Ishim
River. He crawled to his
car and drove home, and his granddaughter watched as he slammed into the
driveway and broke his headlight in the process. There was the school gym
teacher who got sick at her neighbor’s house and sprained her neck. There was
the village veterinarian, who finished castrating 40 pigs before people
realized he had been sick the whole time. One man got sick on his motorcycle.
No one understood how he managed to get back in one piece. There was the town
dance instructor, the former ballerina who tried to dance Swan Lake and The
Nutcracker while sick. There was the former engineer, an amputee, who had
been inside all winter, but came out to the balcony to birdwatch in the spring
and was sick in minutes. There were two pregnant women. There was the mechanic
who had been walking to work when he got the illness, slipped on ice, and broke
his back. There was the man who came to visit his mother-in-law, who’d been in
town only a few hours when he got sick.
Then there was the cat, who everyone thought was sick, until
the owner admitted she had fed it vodka. That didn’t bother people as much as
when the cow died. Everyone was so panicked about their livestock, Acting Mayor
Asel Sadvakasova commissioned a public autopsy by experts imported from Esil
and publicized the results to prove the cow had died of natural causes.
Officials are also still uncertain as to how mines that
have been inactive for 25-years could produce such large levels
of poisonous gas, and why reports of the sickness began only two
years ago.
The uranium mines closed in the late 1980s, but many locals
and some scientists suspect the abandoned works have left a disastrous legacy.
“Concentrations of radon at that particular place are four
or five times normal. And there are uranium ore mines nearby. Maybe [the
problem] comes from there,” Artem Grigoriev, the head of research at the Kazakhstan
national nuclear centre’s institute for radiation safety.
Evacuation of both villages began in January 2015,
with the government seeking to relocate 223 families.
photo credit: google.com
If you appreciate the interesting material that you read, give them and others a chance to enjoy it with a simple SHARE! Thanks in advance !!!
HAVE A NICE DAY!
