When Mr Philip Ocaya heard about the five Neurologists who were carrying mass screenings on persons with mental illness, he hurried to take his only child who he suspects to have epilepsy.

According to Mr Ocaya, his only child who is now one year and four months can neither crawl nor walk due to unexplainable reasons but only keeps nodding.

“We suspected that there was a problem at four month and since then, we have been getting treatment from the mental clinic at Gulu referral centre but there are no changes, and whenever he nods the head, he cries the more,” he said.

According to Dr Andrea Winkler a Neurologist from the Technical University of Munich in Germany and the in charge of the Neurology team which is carrying out the mass screening, there are five doctors in the team and they want to know the prevalence of those who suffer from Neurolo Cycosis (NCC) in Sub Saharan Africa.

“People who eat under cooked pork, develop the illness; warms grow in their large intestines and it eventually goes to the brain and develops a diseases called Taeneosis,” she told Acholi Times.

She however said that all persons who have NCC, 80 percent do not have visible signs and symptoms which keep their lives at risk because it’s hard to treat, you cannot know if they have the disease, only 20 show signs.

Dr Winkler says that “the condition of epilepsy can be treated with drugs called Anthelminthic which are widely available on the market and in hospitals, most pigs in Uganda are affected by the NCC because they eat faeces.”

The two weeks study will take place in Gulu, Nwoya, Adjuman and Kitgum and a sample of 300 patients will be taken to Kampala for scanning for further treatment.

The five Nuelogists two from Austria and three from Germany were sponsored by Germany Research Foundation.

A total of 1,000 patients turned up at the mental department to check for possibilities of Epilepsy as a result of NCC.

Dr William Odur a psychiatrist at the hospital, recently revealed that they receive on average a total of 800 mentally ill patients of which 500 are children who suffer from epilepsy and the nodding disease that was first reported in Kitgum in 2007.