The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic: When an Entire Region Could Not Stop — Tanzania, 1962

About this episode

On January 30th, 1962, three girls at a boarding school in Kashasha, on the western shore of Lake Victoria in what was then Tanganyika, began laughing uncontrollably. By the end of the week, nearly sixty percent of the school's one hundred and fifty-nine pupils were affected — fits of laughter lasting hours, sometimes days, accompanied by crying, fainting, rashes, and difficulty breathing. No joke had been told. No toxin was found. No physiological cause was identified. The school was closed. The students went home. The laughter went with them. Over the following eighteen months the epidemic spread to at least fourteen schools and villages across the region, affecting nearly a thousand people. Schools closed for months. The local government and the medical community were baffled. The colonial administration found the situation both scientifically inexplicable and politically inconvenient. The Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 is documented, investigated, and written up in medical journals. It was not funny. It was terrifying. And it remains, more than sixty years later, stubbornly not fully explained. Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the mission school whe