Kazakhstani officials says they have an explanation for a mysterious epidemic of sleeping sickness: carbon monoxide drifting out of a nearby uranium mine.
This, like so many articles I come across, sounds like the premise for a movie, or maybe the next video game in the vein of SILENT HILL (which ended up BECOMING a movie, so the two are pretty much synonymous). A couple of small towns in rural Kazakhstan (I will never hear of this little nation again without thinking of Borat) has been hit en masse by a bizarre “sleeping sickness” where citizens are literally falling out all over the place, even in traffic. Investigators determined a diagnosis of carbon monoxide poisoning, with the fumes seeping up from a uranium mine beneath the villages, putting the victims to sleep. Yawn . . .
Problem is, for such a large amount of carbon monoxide to be present in a mine, there must be some kind of combustion going on, and this particular mine has been left inactive for years. Thus there shouldn’t BE any carbon monoxide. And let us not forget this is a URANIUM mine we’re talking about, here. As in, radioactive material. Could the sleeping sickness simply be the first stages of a coming plague that will turn the citizenry into shambling, radiation-infused mutants—with the prerequisite hankering for human flesh? (In the movie it would.)
source: www.wired.com