Scandimaro Sleeping Sickness
| Item#: SDS-004⠀ | Clearance Level 3: Confidential |
| Containment Class: Safe | Disruption Class: 4/High |
| Risk Class: 4/Danger |
| Scandimaro Sleeping Sickness | |
|---|---|
| Aliases |
|
| Symptomatic Information | |
| Specialty | Neurology |
| Symptoms |
|
| Complications | Aspiration pneumonia |
| Usual Onset | Sporadic: Late 60s |
| Duration |
|
| Diagnostic Information | |
| Types |
|
| Cause(s) | Prion |
| Risk Factors | Fatal SS: Close contact with infected |
| Diagnosis Method | MRI, visible coma depending on length of early symptoms |
| Differential Diagnosis | Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal insomnia (early) |
| Treatment | Supportive care (early and late stages) |
| Medication | Pain relief |
| Prognosis | 100% risk of coma, deaths are never linked to the disease |
| Frequency |
|
Sleeping Sickness, (known colloquially as "SSS", officially "Scandimaro Sleeping Sickness", and not to be confused with African sleeping sickness,) is a non-fatal degenerative brain disorder. Early symptoms include memory problems and poor coordination, while later symptoms are characterised by behavioural changes and hyper-aggressiveness. All cases of the disease conclude in a coma, of which the length can vary extremely, from a few days to several centuries. During this coma, the pathogen dies, and soon after the patient awakes from the coma, albeit the patient is left with global amnesia. It is named after the country Scandimar, which was the location of the first case of the disease in the modern era, having thought to have been previously eradicated.
SSS is caused by a prion, a misfolded protein that occurs at random in the body. Once a protein has misfolded, it can misfold others too, causing the spread of the disease. Around 75% of sporadic SSS cases are of the normal type, which causes certain coma at the final stage of the disease. The remaining 25% of sporadic cases are of the fatal variant, which oppositely is universally fatal. Normal SSS cannot cause death, and death to SSS patients usually happens due to patient neglect during the coma stage. Similar to, and often mistaked for, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as well as the variants in other animals, notably scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease in deer and mad cow disease in bovines, the disease is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. Extremely rarely, the disease can emerge as a transmissible variant. This has happened twice in known history, both of which had catastrophic effects on humanity. The first, and perhaps the worst, became known as a pandemic called "The Great Sleep."
The disease's variable coma times are determined by the original misfolded protein. This means that each prion has a certain lifespan, as aforementioned this has an extreme range. As the prion infects other proteins, these proteins fold into clones of this original prion, thus when the disease is transmitted the prions share the same genetic material as the original misfolded protein, including its lifespan. This can theoretically mean that the disease could last forever, but it is limited to a few hundred years as that is the longest time the prions can sustain themselves in the host. In the transmissible variant, (as a result of identical genetic makeup of the prions) every patient will be under a coma for the same length of time. In the case of the Great Sleep, the lifespan of the original prion was roughly 300 years, which caused a pause in history for that time, and the effects of said pandemic still echo today, having had a significant impact on the course of Yata's history. As almost all of humanity was affected, sparing societies such as Mei'ra, the rich history of Yata before the pandemic went widely unknown until efforts to encode deceased thoughts into a computer.
Since the second pandemic of the disease, it has come under strict SDS encryption, enabling samples of prions to be taken for widespread research for potential preventions or even cures for the disease. One of the last remaining copies of the Second Pandemic prion was contained in Biological-Site-7, where it was classified as FLORIN due to the relative secure containment of the final copies. This facility was later seized by the United Occult Initiative, whom has maintained containment despite a major SDS raid.
