sleeping sickness

sleeping sickness (usually uncountable, plural sleeping sicknesses)

1. (pathology) Any of several diseases of which lethargy is a major symptom:
   1. especially, African sleeping sickness, an endemic infectious disease of humans and animals in tropical Africa, caused by a parasitic trypanosome, transmitted by the tsetse fly and characterized by fever, severe headache, joint pains and lymph node swelling in the early stages, followed by a neurological phase of extreme weakness, sleepiness, and deep coma leading to death
   2. Also, animal trypanosomiasis, also known as nagana or animal African trypanosomiasis
   3. eastern equine encephalitis, caused by a zoonotic alphavirus and arbovirus present in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean
   4. encephalitis lethargica, a form of encephalitis, of unknown cause, that swept the world in the 1920s.

• (African sleeping sickness): African trypanosomiasis, negro lethargy (archaic), sleepy distemper (archaic)