Also known as Encephalitis Lethargica, Encephalitis lethargica (disorder), Encephalitis lethargica (disorder) [Ambiguous], von Economo disease, lethargic encephalitis, Von Economo encephalitis,
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Encephalitis lethargica (EL) is an atypical form of encephalitis. Also known as "von Economo Encephalitis", "sleeping sickness" or "sleepy sickness" (distinct from tsetse fly–transmitted sleeping sickness), it was first described in 1917 by neurologist Constantin von Economo and pathologist Jean-René Cruchet. The disease attacks the brain, leaving some victims in a statue-like condition, speechless and motionless. Between 1915 and 1926, an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica spread around the world. The exact number of people infected is unknown, but it is estimated that more than one million people contracted the disease during the epidemic, which directly caused more than 500,000 deaths. Most of those who survived never recovered their pre-morbid vigor.
Neurologist Constantin von Economo (upper left photo) and the patients
atypical form of encephalitis
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).