“Write on my hand,” says the nurse. Pauline just sits on the reed mat, her legs pulled to one side, and stares. She has just had an attack and can’t speak. She struggles to comprehend her surroundings.

Pauline, 13, has been struck by the dreaded nodding disease. Her mother, Grace Lagat, says it will take her at least four hours to recover from the seizures, and after each attack she seems less like the daughter she remembers.

“Her personality has changed greatly from before. She was normal when they were born. Now she just moves around and serves no purpose,” Lagat says.

Pauline, like more than 3,000 other children in Northern Uganda, has been struck by the mysterious syndrome that has doctors and scientists puzzled and has shattered lives in this rural community.

Nodding disease gets its name from the strange nodding-like symptoms that children display in the first stages of a seizure. But doctors on the ground and at the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that is the least profound effect.

Severe epilepsy-like seizures grip the children, they struggle to eat, and they become shells of their former selves. It is a progressive and debilitating syndrome that robs children of their future.

The seizures are triggered in strange ways, say community members, such as when unfamiliar food is brought to the children or when the weather changes.

There are other bizarre symptoms. Often the children will wander off by themselves and get lost in the bush. And other children will start fires, according to parents and medics in the field. Others appear confused and traumatized.

We were told that several houses in areas we visited had been burnt down by children suffering from nodding disease. More than 200 deaths have been reported from these ‘secondary’ incidents.

Once, Pauline vanished for five days. Now, to protect her children Lagat ties them up when she leaves.

She pulls Pauline and her brother, Thomas, who also suffers from nodding disease, inside her hut and ties them with a colorful, local fabric. First, she ties their legs to a wooden pole and then their hands together like handcuffs. Thomas tears at them with his teeth.

“When I am going to the garden, I tie them with cloth. If I don’t tie them I come back and find that they have disappeared,” she says.

Liberia, Sudan, and Tanzania have all suffered outbreaks of nodding disease over the years, but it first came to the attention of Ugandan authorities in 2009.

A team from the World Health Organization team visited the region of Gulu and Kitgum and noticed a high incidence of the disturbing symptoms.

“It was quite desperate, I can tell you,” says Dr. Joaquin Saweka, the WHO representative in Uganda. “Imagine being surrounded by 26 children and 12 of them showing signs of this. The attitude was to quickly find a solution to the problem.”

Saweka and the Ugandan government mobilized teams from WHO, CDC, and local health teams.

Right now there is no real solution. Nodding disease leads to epilepsy like symptoms, says the World Health Organization, but the cause is unknown and there is no cure.

But there are clues. WHO officials say 93 percent of cases are found in areas also with the parasitic worm Onchocerca Volvulus, which causes river blindness and is carried by the Black Fly. And many cases show a deficiency in Vitamin B6. Nutrition also seems to play an important role.

“At first we cast the net wide. We ruled out three dozen potential causes and we are working on a handful of probabilities,” says Dr. Scott Dowell, director of global disease detection and emergency response at CDC.

While nodding disease hasn’t triggered the response that, say, an outbreak of Ebola would, the CDC has conducted field investigations and extensive lab work, says Dowell.

This outbreak in Uganda is confined to the north and is not believed to be contagious, but from a public health standpoint it still has to be taken seriously.

“We know from past experience an unknown disease could end up having more global implications,” says Dr. Dowell.

For Ugandan children in the region it is having massive implications.

In the first three days of registering children at the Atanga health center in Pader district last week, more than 400 possible cases showed up. One extended family had seven children afflicted with Nodding Disease — all of them severely stunted physically and mentally.

Nodding disease seems to only affect children between 1 to 19 years, with the worst affected at ages 3 to 11, based on anecdotal evidence gathered by health workers.

It is unclear how many fatalities have been caused by the disease itself, but its victims are left unable to function in any meaningful sense and profoundly dependent on others for care.

And all this is in a region where many families suffered for decades from the brutality of the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, which abducted thousands of children and pushed civilians into mass camps.

Almost every household in Pader district seems to be affected. We follow the nurse into cluster of huts, where another child, Francis, has just passed out. He lies in a pool of his own urine, saliva pouring out of his mouth, still twitching from the last affects of a seizure.

The nurse tries not to touch him and doesn’t want to take his pulse. There is just too much mystery surrounding the illness.

“I feel, because I don’t know what causes it, I don’t even know how it transmits, when I touch them I feel that I can also get the infection because I don’t know what causes it,” says Elupe Petua, a local nursing officer.

So Francis is left alone. Only his mother, Agnes Apio, helps to clean him up with a bucket of water and waves away flies from his face.

“I feel dark in my heart. This boy has become nothing,” she says. Francis can only move by dragging himself along the dirt, but she still ties him up when she leaves the homestead.

“Everyone is affected. In the household everyone and in the larger community setting the whole community is also suffering, trying to understand why them at this particular time,” says Simon Anyanzo, of the Ugandan Red Cross.

Doctors are using drugs for controlling epilepsy with some limited success. But they say it only slows the progression of symptoms, rather than stops them.

After months of delay, Uganda did last week begin the drive to register cases.

One health outpost in the Pader told CNN they hadn’t received anti-epilepsy drugs for four months and they had been forced to turn away desperate families. Now the health center has received drugs, but they fear the high number of cases could overwhelm them.

One local member of parliament was so desperate to get attention for the disease that in early March he transported 25 suspected cases by bus to Kampala for treatment at the country’s main referral hospital.

Uganda’s health ministry says they are doing enough. They say they have switched to a more effective epilepsy drug and they are training local health workers to deal with the disease.

Saweka says: “People complain that it looks like the lives in developing countries have less value than the lives in the western countries. When you know the root cause, you address the cure. Now you are just relieving the symptoms. We don’t expect to cure anybody.”

David McKenzie, CNN

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That’s not to deny that the government of Syria is conducting a brutal, no-holds-barred attack against a nationwide rebellion that is, increasingly, led by armed paramilitary forces and, well, terrorists.

But the Battle of Syria 2012 pits Saudi Arabia, Turkey, an bloc of Sunni Arab states, the Muslim Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda against Syria and the regime of President Bashar Assad, whose quasi-Shiite minority Alawite sect forms the core of his political power and who is backed by Shiite Iran. It’s no surprise that the United States, which swallowed Saudi Arabia’s ongoing vicious crackdown on the Shiite rebellion in the island Sunni kingdom of Bahrain, is on board with what increasingly looks like a Saudi- and Turkish-backed effort at forcible regime change in Damascus.

The latest wrinkles:

One, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, a complacent oppositionist force there, is backing the rebellion in Syria. Although little or nothing is known about who’s leading the Syrian revolt, it’s almost certain that in cities such as Hama, Homs, and Aleppo the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is leading the charge. For decades, Arab leaders such as Hosni Mubarak and Hafez Assad, Bashar’s father, warned that if they fell from power the Islamists would take over. It seems that they were right, although in Egypt today the military heirs of the Mubarak regime and trying to hold on to power while seeking a compact with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Two, the Iraqi Sunni movement, including its  Al Qaeda in Iraq component, is mobilizing to support the Sunni sectarian revolt in Syria. That’s because many Iraqi Sunnis see the fall of Assad as a way of counterbalancing the Shiite, Iran-influenced regime of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. If Assad falls, Maliki is likely to come under much stronger Iranian pressure to tie Iraq to Iran more overtly, and if he doesn’t cooperate the Iranians will get rid of him and replace him with someone who’ll do so.

Three, in at least some high profile cases Al Qaeda seems to responsible for a series of devastating bombings in Aleppo and elsewhere. One bombing in Damascus killed 70 people. A U.S. official told the New York Times:

It comes as no surprise that Al Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate — through its networks in Syria — might attempt to seem relevant by going after the Assad regime.

The bombs in Aleppo seemed coordinated with an attack on Syrian government buildings by the so-called Syrian Free Army, a Turkey-based, and apparently Turkish-backed, militia force. Reported the Times:

Senior officers in the Turkey-based Free Syrian Army, which includes defectors from the security forces, said it had carried out an armed attack on the two headquarters earlier in the day, prompting skirmishes with the military.

The pompous king of Saudi Arabia, whose intelligence service backed the Sunni rebellion in Iraq and which now supports the Sunni revolt in Syria, bitterly criticized the votes by China and Russia at  the UN, which vetoed a UN Security Council resolution against Syria. Said the king, who rules a dictatorship of princes, “We are going through scary days and unfortunately what happened at the United Nations is absolutely regrettable,” said His Kleptocratic Majesty. “The world is ruled by brains by justice, by morals and by fairness.”

That was too much for even the Washington Post, which slammed Saudi Arabia in an editorial, noting that Saudi Arabia was using military force against its own dissidents. And it added:

But brains, justice, morals and fairness are in short supply not only in Mr. Assad’s Damascus but in the royal palaces of Riyadh as well.

Al Qaeda’s Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian, explicitly endorsed the anti-Assad rebellion this week, following the bomb explosions in Damascus and Aleppo that U.S. officials blamed on Al Qaeda. Said Zawahiri:

Wounded Syria still bleeds day after day while the butcher, son of the butcher Bashar bin Hafiz [Hafez al-Assad], is not deterred to stop. But the resistance of our people in Syria despite all the pain, sacrifice and bloodshed escalates and grows. … If we want freedom, we must be liberated from this regime. If we want justice, we must retaliate against this regime. Continue your revolt and anger, don’t accept anything else apart from independent, respectful governments.

On the right and among neoconservatives, there are calls for the United States to intervene directly in Syria, by imposing a no-fly zone, by arming and training the rebels (which might already be happening at NATO bases in Turkey), and even by adopting a Libya-style campaign of bombs, drones and missiles against Assad. Welcome to the Arab Spring, Part II.

Robert Dreyfuss -The Nation