sleeping sickness

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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.
   2. Animal 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)

• sleeping sickness on Wikipedia.Wikipedia