Via The Africa Report: Nodding syndrome preys on the displaced. This is one of the longer and more detailed reports I've seen recently. Excerpt:
Walter Ojok should be enjoying his life as a young teenage boy with all life's trials and tribulations. Instead, he lies hapless and nude on a stack of dry reeds, peering at the grass thatched roof of his family's hut, unable to communicate, always watched over.
Ojok has the frame of four year old, and yet he is 14 years old. His body is miserably thin and frail, his back severely hunched and his eyes teary. He should, at 14, be able to construct sentences, but all he is able to say is 'wota...wota...' a desperate attempt to say his name.
Ojok is afflicted with an unexplained neurologic condition called Nodding Syndrome, characterised by episodes of repetitive head dropping movements, and accompanied by seizures and convulsions, as well as 'staring' spells.
Even as he is severely under-nourished, the sight of food acts as a trigger intensifying the symptoms.
Ojok was born in Aware Camp, a refuge for those escaping the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who ravaged northern Uganda and abducted children for training as child soldiers.
"At the age of eight my son started getting convulsions," said Ojok's mother, Alice Akwero. "When we tried to give him food, he would nod his head and begin to drool."
Ojok would become the first child to display the condition's unique symptoms at Awere camp. Being susceptible to falling into fires or drowning, when convulsing or wandering off, Ojok required a carer at all hours of the day.
When the family left the camp in 2007, after peace had returned to northern Uganda, Ojok's mother charged three of her children to remain at home to help with his upbringing.
Hard Lessons
Yet Ojok, while physically wasting away, is one of the luckier ones.
Since the start of 2013, three children have died from the condition.
According to last year's records from the Office of the Director-General at Uganda's Ministry of Health, more than 3000 cases were registered in the northern districts of Lamwo, Kitgum and Pader, where the condition was first registered in 2010.
To date, 17 deaths have been reported. In Odek, where Ojok is based, over 300 children are known suffer from nodding syndrome.
