This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommend it.

On the 21st of August, 1981, Australian physician Julie Cliff received the following message on her telex,

a print-on-paper precursor to modern text messaging.

Polio outbreak. MEPA District, 38 cases. Reflexes increased.

The apparently routine message was sent from the Provincial Health Directorate in Nampula, a city in northern Mozambique.

Cliff worked in the Epidemiology Department of the Mozambican Ministry of Health in Maputo at the southern end of the country.

Effective vaccines against poliomyelitis, a food and waterborne infectious disease that can damage nerves and cause paralysis,

had been developed in the 1950s and 1960s, eliminating

polio from many industrialized countries.

However, the disease remained rife throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

So the message was unremarkable, except for one thing.

In the acute phase of polio, tendon reflexes are not increased.

They are absent. Only a few possible reasons could account for this inconsistency.

Flawed examination of the patients, a typo in the telex,

or some unknown disease process causing an unusual pattern of paralysis

in the unfortunate Mozambicans.

Dr. Cliff arrived in Nampula Province shortly afterwards as part of a small health ministry investigation team, determined to get to the root of the mystery.

Typographical errors and poor clinical examination technique were quickly ruled out as possible explanations for the anomaly.

Close inspection of affected individuals confirmed the disease was definitely not polio.

Yet the question remained, what else could it be?

Other doctors already at the scene included a young medic from Sweden named Hans Rosling,

...