Ever had a giggle that you just couldn’t stop for the life of you? You wished it could stop but the laughter was so big other people started laughing with you, and eventually you were all laugh-crying covered in glow in the dark stars and a pile of beanie babies in the middle of the mall being taken away in handcuffs while the mushrooms wore off?
Oh… just me. I see.
Anyway. Let’s talk about that time laughing was super contagious.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemic.
Tanzania had a tumultuous hundred someodd years of management changing hands (see also: colonizers fucking shit up). German colonists had claimed it as part of German East Africa in the late 1800s. After WWI, it came under British control as the Tanganyika Territory. The United Nations took hold of it as a trust territory in the wake of WWII, and finally it gained independence on December 9th, 1961. A few years later in 1964, they formed a republic with Zanzibar that would soon take the name Tanzania.
But we’re talking 1962. So let’s head to the Kashasha School on the shore of Lake Victoria in Kashasha, Tanganyika.
It was an ordinary enough day in January when the laughter commenced. Three girls just started giggling and couldn’t stop. The laughter it seemed was literally contagious, spreading through the school to the disruption of lessons. The students at this all-girls Christian boarding school were aged 12-18, and out of 159 of them, 95 were afflicted with a severe case of the giggles. Teachers and staff seemed unaffected, which could seem like an indication that the students were pulling something.
Then the epidemic spread to nearby villages.
The students weren’t pleased with themselves; they were suffering. The laughing was accompanied by crying and restlessness, sometimes causing the afflicted to run aimlessly. Laughing spells came with rashes, respiratory issues, and even fainting. It wasn’t continuous through the months that the epidemic carried on. It would come in painful, breathless, spells, sometimes hours or days long.
Reportedly farting was a symptom, but whom amongst us hasn’t had a giggle fit and worried about burrito heading prematurely ringside?
Fortunately, unlike the dancing plague that swept across parts of Europe starting in 1518, the epidemic of laughter claimed no fatalities. It reportedly took until the summer of 1963 for the epidemic to end entirely. In those eighteen months, about a thousand people were afflicted. Fourteen schools had to be temporarily closed. The Kashasha School was sued for “allowing” this scourge to spread to surrounding communities, as though they had birthed the plague themselves.
The cause of all this? There’s no virus, bacteria, or even prion that we know of (yet) that presents with a sole symptom of infectious laughter. There have been other theories, but it’s now widely thought to have been a mass psychogenic illness (MPI). People are more susceptible to MPI when under extreme stress. Between the recent political turmoil and some of the girls adjusting for the first time to strict rules at their new Christian boarding school, it perhaps wasn’t the most ordinary of days in January.
I still like to think those three girls played a really fantastic prank.
This has been your daily Moment of science, welcoming you to the giggle loop.
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Given the proximity of Mount Kilimanjaro, a dormant volcano, I always wondered if some odd chemistry resulted in a nitrous oxide release. That is infamous as a giggle gas, far more so than other gases and sulfur dioxide releases concurrent with the release could also cause the reported rash. That’d also dovetail nicely with reported oracle experiences at other volcanic vent regions.
And be far more pleasant than the documented CO2 lake emissions that were quite fatal in other lakes that were close to volcanic gas sources.