Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) in an adolescent Ethiopian girl

Some 50 years have elapsed since Dawson first described a 16-year-old girl with an inclusion encephalitis. Since then, numerous publications on subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) have appeared in the world literature. However, most of these reports are from the developed world. There have been few reports from Africa. One of them was from Kenya, where a retrospective analysis of EEGs of patients with epilepsy over a 5-year period identified 53 probable cases of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (1). The other one was from South Africa where an incidence of 1.2 per million per year was reported on the basis of 15 cases collected from two hospitals in the Cape Province (2). No case, as yet, has been reported from Ethiopia. This paper reports SSPE presenting in an adolescent Ethiopian girl who had measles at the age of 18 months.