On January 30th, 1962, three girls at a mission school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) started giggling and couldn’t stop, triggering one of history’s strangest epidemics that would last 18 months and affect over 1,000 people. The uncontrollable laughter spread from Kashasha School to nearby villages, forcing 14 schools to close as students laughed continuously for days or even weeks, experiencing pain, fainting, and terror rather than joy. The epidemic primarily affected young women and students in the newly independent nation, with some victims laughing for up to 16 days straight before collapsing from exhaustion.

Scientists later diagnosed it as Mass Sociogenic Illness, essentially stress-induced mass hysteria triggered by the extreme pressures of political independence, poverty, and strict colonial-style education. The laughter finally stopped in mid-1963 as mysteriously as it began, leaving affected individuals stigmatized in their communities and providing a disturbing preview of how psychological symptoms can spread through populations like a contagious disease, a phenomenon we now see globally through social media with conditions like “TikTok Tics.”

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