IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, Ben Blackwell, a five-year-old living near Dublin, Ireland, began complaining of headaches and a squealing noise in his head. And even though he’d stopped taking naps three years earlier, he now randomly fell asleep—while watching television, reading a book, sitting in the car. When Ben’s parents, James and Natalie, succeeded in rousing him, he often snarled at them and seemed terrified. But a few hours later, he’d be fine.
Natalie read a newspaper article about dramatic changes in the behavior of some children who had been vaccinated against the flu. Because of the disproven link between vaccines and autism, James associated any talk of vaccine-related problems with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. But Natalie dug up more news items, and it turned out that a number of children across Northern Europe—from Ireland to Finland—did indeed appear to have developed a sleeping disorder after inoculation against the previous winter’s swine flu. Ben had received the vaccine at school. Now a test of his spinal fluid showed a complete lack of the hormone hypocretin, which regulates wakefulness. An absence of hypocretin can indicate the sleep disorder narcolepsy, and that was Ben’s diagnosis. “In a sense, it was a huge relief,” says James Blackwell. “Finally we could start working on making it better.”
