sleeping sickness

Meanings

1. Any of several diseases of which lethargy is a major symptom:
2. Especially, African sleeping sickness, an endemic infectious disease of humans and animals in tropical Africa, caused by a parasitic trypanosome.
3. Animal trypanosomiasis.
4. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by a zoonotic alphavirus and arbovirus present in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
5. Encephalitis lethargica, a form of encephalitis, of unknown cause, that swept the world in the 1920s.