10 ms·

5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

128 points by awnird 3y ago

tokai 3y ago
The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  This was another hysteria that was constantly government-fueled, and discussion of it completely disappeared once the people who met every morning to whiteboard how best to push it were assigned to other projects.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    It's very strange that the serious position is to pretend like this was an organic social phenomenon, an incident of mass psychology, and ignore the fact that it was always, as far as any science goes, a physically impossible proposition, entirely fueled by successive administrations advocating for it in every mainstream media outlet. This was another reason why Russia was a nation of comic book style evil geniuses that have to be stopped: a bond-style brain scrambling sound ray. Any sort of lesson learned that doesn't focus on the fact that this was a fraud, not a mistake, was not a good lesson to learn. But instead of learning any lesson, people are going to just forget about it, and when reminded, still think that it really happened. That all the comments on this page are people saying that this syndrome - that has never been any definitive trace of, caused by a mystery sound weapon which we have no physical theory of how it would operate (only that at night it sounds just like crickets) - is actually still real and really happened, is shocking.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1oooqooq 3y ago
      why not both? covid is now proven both as lab leak and a convenient emergency for multiple ends /s?
- Mindless2112 3y ago
  This study isn't evidence against it. > The NIH study, which began in 2018 and included more than 80 Havana syndrome patients, wasn't designed to examine the likelihood of some weapon or other trigger for Havana syndrome symptoms.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - tokai 3y ago
    I know. I wrote "no evidence for".
    - skygazer 3y ago
      I think they're just establishing a scope for the "no evidence for," because "no evidence for" doesn't necessarily imply "evidence against" but it's often interpreted that way.
    - dotps1 3y ago
      I mean the fact that they did this before, I think should go in the evidence column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Signal After they got caught they put extra cladding up on the building, and the soviets in turn responded by just making their signal transmission stronger.
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        That is far, far most likely an RF signal used to power espionage devices. Both the US and the USSR played with putting passively powered espionage devices. The idea it was done to injure embassy staff at this point is a conspiracy theory.
        jonathanstrange 3y ago
        It's not meaningful to call a hypothesis a "conspiracy theory" in this everyday sense when the world of espionage is concerned. Many things that people would intuitively put into conspiracy theory territory have occurred or are even common in clandestine service scenarios. Bugs have been put into buildings during construction years before they were used, radioactive substances were used to track people, one-time pads written by secretaries on typewriters were broken in deciphering efforts that took many years, hardware devices were intercepted and modified during ordinary mail order process, Swiss companies specialized in encryption were entirely compromised and run by the CIA, people have been murdered with poison pellets from a gun looking like an umbrella, etc.
- francisofascii 3y ago
  While I agree there is not evidence of a weapon, I am not buying hypochondria. The amount of reports and the peculiarity of the hearing symptoms don't add up to hypochondria. Local environmental pathogens or chemicals could be a cause. Also, our ability to detect such pathogens or brain abnormalities is still very limited, so finding no abnormalities is not surprising.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Lots of reports and peculiar symptoms don't rule out psychogenic causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness We had a case of it near us in upstate New York a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-tw... (https://archive.is/EoY7e https://archive.is/EoY7e)
    - kurthr 3y ago
      Neither do they particularly support it. https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8 https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8 -Benn Jordan video Lot's of people hear low pitched sounds, for decades, and it's been in the news. It must be psychosomatic... oops, we can measure it (~60dB), because we bothered to check. Where's it coming from? Don't know, but maybe NatGas pumping stations? Now, the reason I doubted that RF was causing this is that enough radio wave power to penetrate skulls at a distance would have been easily detected with some LEDs and short pieces of wire. The idea that there aren't wide band RF detectors in embassies strains credulity. You could put them in glasses trivially. I think it would take me 5 minutes with a soldering iron and parts on hand, and be almost indetectable without examining the glasses.
- wnc3141 3y ago
  i wonder if there's legal precedent for management induced mental illness as other physical workplace hazards have
- bjourne 3y ago
  The hysteria wouldn't even have started if it wasn't for the "top men" hypothesis. If women had experienced similar symptoms absolutely no one would have suggested sonic weapons over stress from overwork or other psychogenic factors. The underlying idea is that male diplomats with prestigious careers are highly-trained professionals or something and thus immune to outbreaks of mass hysteria. That clearly is not the case.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Chronic stress affects your brain though. It's common to find hippocampus abnormalities in burnout patients.
- asdff 3y ago
  It makes you think about the implications of this. A stressed workforce is not an efficient one at all. Say you want to get an advantage against your competitor without directly attacking their labor. How might you increase stress levels? What levers can you pull to make these diplomats to pull all nighters at the embassy for weeks at a time? I imagine its very cheap to pull such levers if you are an enemy intelligence agency who is read up on american standard operating procedure.
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  What about the physical evidence from Gary Nolan?
- timbo1642 3y ago
  This is the most foolish and most uneducated response I've read. You're saying nonsense. Just because we don't have the weapon that causes the issue the issue doesn't exist and is all in their heads? Get educated about what you're talking about. Watch some interviews of people that have it. We even know the exact sound the weapon makes. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
DonnyV 3y ago
[flagged]
Aurornis 3y ago
> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything. That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems. It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurological symptoms aren’t real, though I see some other commenters jumping to conclusions.
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  You can't for example see ME/CFS or Long Covid neural damage on a typical MRI but when you do autopsies you find a host of problems including complete viral RNA and intrusion of the immune system that shouldn't be there. Given the similar presentation of Havana syndrome to ME/CFS it would seem sensible to look for some of the similar markers of vascular brain damage with the process developed there by Jared Younger and we will likely find a similar type of brain abnormalities. Just because it doesn't appear on MRI doesn't mean its the only type of test that can be done to find abnormalities in the brain, there are a lot of possibilities for further tests in similar presentations of symptoms.
  - ineedaj0b 3y ago
    I have heard you can see long Covid on an MRI. There will be more papers on it in the future
  - oldstrangers 3y ago
    Very unrelated but if anyone reading this is dealing with long covid/brain fog related symptoms, try famotidine (pepcid).
    - treyd 3y ago
      What's the justification for this recommendation? I find this really curious since I had some stomach acid issues that started during the pandemic (like, perhaps late 2020) that I assumed were stress related. I don't remember actually getting COVID in that time span (my uni was testing us every 3 days so I would have noticed if I had it around then). My primary care prescribed me famotidine for it in ~2022 which helped for a while. I still take it regularly but I did a 90 run of omeprazole last year.
jmyeet 3y ago
Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please. Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it. So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve? With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]). Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3]. Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded. So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA). [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-... [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police-top-line-of-duty-death-usa-2022 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police...
- immibis 3y ago
  This sort of thing isn't unheard of. It's not like the USA wouldn't do the same to diplomats from other countries if it wanted to. It's not like every pair of nearby embassies and the host country don't have various radio beams pointed at each other all the time. You can easily imagine at least one simple possibility: Cuba replicated The Thing and is using a microwave beam to power it which is too strong.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
richardgreeko84 3y ago
[flagged]
- 111111101101 3y ago
  It seems to be a uniquely American thing. In my country at least (Australia), anything that benefits the common man isn't labelled as communism. It's probably related to hysteria induced by McCarthyism.
  - ineedaj0b 3y ago
    Australia is particularly strange. The US tries hard to paint democracy as a positive world wide. I would imagine the CCP would paint themselves a good position too. If you were in a position of power in the CCP, who wouldn’t push for positive propaganda to all nearby territories? All innocent Australians should realize they are consuming proChinese and proAmerican /foreign/ propaganda. I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. The US is busy with Russia and Europe and likely will be for the next 10-15 years
    - whoopdedo 3y ago
      > I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. It's in their interest to influence Australian politicians since that's where all the TLAs intercept Chinese communications from.
    - maxcoder4 3y ago
      >I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. What are your sources? All declassified documents that I know of suggest otherwise. For example UK's Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament report titled "China" almost starts with "China sees almost all of its global activity in the context of its struggle with the US".
- immibis 3y ago
  It is, but Havana Syndrome doesn't seem to have much to do with communism. Every country spies on every other country - even allies - and embassies are good places to do that - so there are all sorts of radio beams flying around those areas. The simplest hypothesis is that one of them accidentally also interacts with humans and Cuba doesn't really care much to fix it (wouldn't blame them).
vaidhy 3y ago
[flagged]
- sandworm101 3y ago
  Downvoting individual posts on HN? That has to be the lowest job possible in the CIA. If you are reading this, I feel your pain. I too have had crap jobs that required humiliating work.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  afaik posts can't get downvotes on hn, only comments. My karma is north of 14k. Maybe I haven't unlocked some undocumented downvote privilege, but if it exists, it's certainly not public and the barrier to entry is quite high.
  - frame_ranger 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - vaidhy 3y ago
    You are right.. I meant comments.
- tomoyoirl 3y ago
  Perhaps because they’re approaching the matter with flippant dismissals that it’s “made up” and invoking the Cold War with shallow accusations that it’s anti communist propaganda — rather than anything that resembles discourse on why we ought believe this to be the case. (Postscript) In contrast, the one which raises the possibility of hypochondria and burnout is still at the top in my browser; it seems adequately skeptical, but doesn’t appear to be radically downvoted like the others, presumably because there’s more content to it.
urduntupu 3y ago
[flagged]
someotherperson 3y ago
I'm waiting for it to turn out to be something stupid like highly lead-contaminated cutlery, furniture and other things. Or maybe some sort of pesticide or insecticide being sprayed on or around the building.
- roxgib 3y ago
  Can't speak to pesticides, but lead would have been detected in blood tests
- applied_heat 3y ago
  One study did identify heavy pesticide use due to concerns about Zika virus and measured changes in people’s brains before and after their trips to Cuba: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-enqu%C3%AAte-1.5288609 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...
- bjourne 3y ago
  It was the sound of crickets: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-syndrome-crickets-not-microwaves-report-1235163/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-s...
SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
People like to believe in medical "certainty". This kind of headline is just a symptom of that. All this headline really means is that it has failed to find where the abnormalities are, but we translate not finding brain abnormalities, to there being none. This is why you need to be your own advocate when it comes to your health, you can't allow yourself to be talked down because some arbitrary test tells you you're not experiencing what you are. Unfortunately, most people only find this out the hard way.
stonedge 3y ago
There was an episode of the German Krimi series Tatort yesterday that had a plot that centered around Havana Syndrome.
richardgreeko84 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geor9e 3y ago
There have been a lot of "mass-hysteria" events in history, but we never seem to develop good strategies to detect it, other than years later historians saying "we never really found a shred of evidence…"
rapjr9 3y ago
I find a few issues with the study paper: The papers results section says: Results Among the 81 participants with AHIs, the mean (SD) age was 42 (9) years and 49% were female; among the 48 control participants, the mean (SD) age was 43 (11) years and 42% were female. Imaging scans were performed as early as 14 days after experiencing AHIs with a median delay period of 80 (IQR, 36-544) days. After adjustment for multiple comparisons, no significant differences between participants with AHIs and control participants were found for any MRI modality. At an unadjusted threshold (Pless than .05), compared with control participants, participants with AHIs had lower intranetwork connectivity in the salience networks, a larger corpus callosum, and diffusion MRI differences in the corpus callosum, superior longitudinal fasciculus, cingulum, inferior cerebellar peduncle, and amygdala. The structural MRI measurements were highly reproducible (median coefficient of variation less than 1% across all global volumetric ROIs and less than 1.5% for all white matter ROIs for diffusion metrics). Even individuals with large differences from control participants exhibited stable longitudinal results (typically, less than ±1% across visits), suggesting the absence of evolving lesions. The relationships between the imaging and clinical variables were weak (median Spearman =0.10). The study did not replicate the results of a previously published investigation of AHIs. So it seems they did find large differences, but the differences did not change which they interpret as "the absence of evolving lesions" and hence nothing to worry about. If this was one time damage from exposure to something why would they expect evolving lesions? How can they ignore the large differences they did find compared to the control subjects? Also they say they started the study in 2018, but the original cases started in 2016, so based on their subject selection criteria their results only apply to people who reported AHIs in later years.

128 points by awnird 3y ago

The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.

pessimizer 3y ago
This was another hysteria that was constantly government-fueled, and discussion of it completely disappeared once the people who met every morning to whiteboard how best to push it were assigned to other projects.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It's very strange that the serious position is to pretend like this was an organic social phenomenon, an incident of mass psychology, and ignore the fact that it was always, as far as any science goes, a physically impossible proposition, entirely fueled by successive administrations advocating for it in every mainstream media outlet. This was another reason why Russia was a nation of comic book style evil geniuses that have to be stopped: a bond-style brain scrambling sound ray. Any sort of lesson learned that doesn't focus on the fact that this was a fraud, not a mistake, was not a good lesson to learn. But instead of learning any lesson, people are going to just forget about it, and when reminded, still think that it really happened. That all the comments on this page are people saying that this syndrome - that has never been any definitive trace of, caused by a mystery sound weapon which we have no physical theory of how it would operate (only that at night it sounds just like crickets) - is actually still real and really happened, is shocking.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1oooqooq 3y ago
    why not both? covid is now proven both as lab leak and a convenient emergency for multiple ends /s?
Mindless2112 3y ago
This study isn't evidence against it. > The NIH study, which began in 2018 and included more than 80 Havana syndrome patients, wasn't designed to examine the likelihood of some weapon or other trigger for Havana syndrome symptoms.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tokai 3y ago
  I know. I wrote "no evidence for".
  - skygazer 3y ago
    I think they're just establishing a scope for the "no evidence for," because "no evidence for" doesn't necessarily imply "evidence against" but it's often interpreted that way.
  - dotps1 3y ago
    I mean the fact that they did this before, I think should go in the evidence column https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Signal After they got caught they put extra cladding up on the building, and the soviets in turn responded by just making their signal transmission stronger.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      That is far, far most likely an RF signal used to power espionage devices. Both the US and the USSR played with putting passively powered espionage devices. The idea it was done to injure embassy staff at this point is a conspiracy theory.
      - jonathanstrange 3y ago
        It's not meaningful to call a hypothesis a "conspiracy theory" in this everyday sense when the world of espionage is concerned. Many things that people would intuitively put into conspiracy theory territory have occurred or are even common in clandestine service scenarios. Bugs have been put into buildings during construction years before they were used, radioactive substances were used to track people, one-time pads written by secretaries on typewriters were broken in deciphering efforts that took many years, hardware devices were intercepted and modified during ordinary mail order process, Swiss companies specialized in encryption were entirely compromised and run by the CIA, people have been murdered with poison pellets from a gun looking like an umbrella, etc.
francisofascii 3y ago
While I agree there is not evidence of a weapon, I am not buying hypochondria. The amount of reports and the peculiarity of the hearing symptoms don't add up to hypochondria. Local environmental pathogens or chemicals could be a cause. Also, our ability to detect such pathogens or brain abnormalities is still very limited, so finding no abnormalities is not surprising.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Lots of reports and peculiar symptoms don't rule out psychogenic causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness We had a case of it near us in upstate New York a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-tw... (https://archive.is/EoY7e https://archive.is/EoY7e)
  - kurthr 3y ago
    Neither do they particularly support it. https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8 https://youtu.be/zy_ctHNLan8 -Benn Jordan video Lot's of people hear low pitched sounds, for decades, and it's been in the news. It must be psychosomatic... oops, we can measure it (~60dB), because we bothered to check. Where's it coming from? Don't know, but maybe NatGas pumping stations? Now, the reason I doubted that RF was causing this is that enough radio wave power to penetrate skulls at a distance would have been easily detected with some LEDs and short pieces of wire. The idea that there aren't wide band RF detectors in embassies strains credulity. You could put them in glasses trivially. I think it would take me 5 minutes with a soldering iron and parts on hand, and be almost indetectable without examining the glasses.
wnc3141 3y ago
i wonder if there's legal precedent for management induced mental illness as other physical workplace hazards have
bjourne 3y ago
The hysteria wouldn't even have started if it wasn't for the "top men" hypothesis. If women had experienced similar symptoms absolutely no one would have suggested sonic weapons over stress from overwork or other psychogenic factors. The underlying idea is that male diplomats with prestigious careers are highly-trained professionals or something and thus immune to outbreaks of mass hysteria. That clearly is not the case.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Chronic stress affects your brain though. It's common to find hippocampus abnormalities in burnout patients.
asdff 3y ago
It makes you think about the implications of this. A stressed workforce is not an efficient one at all. Say you want to get an advantage against your competitor without directly attacking their labor. How might you increase stress levels? What levers can you pull to make these diplomats to pull all nighters at the embassy for weeks at a time? I imagine its very cheap to pull such levers if you are an enemy intelligence agency who is read up on american standard operating procedure.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
What about the physical evidence from Gary Nolan?
timbo1642 3y ago
This is the most foolish and most uneducated response I've read. You're saying nonsense. Just because we don't have the weapon that causes the issue the issue doesn't exist and is all in their heads? Get educated about what you're talking about. Watch some interviews of people that have it. We even know the exact sound the weapon makes. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

DonnyV 3y ago

[flagged]

Aurornis 3y ago

> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything. That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems. It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurological symptoms aren’t real, though I see some other commenters jumping to conclusions.

PaulKeeble 3y ago
You can't for example see ME/CFS or Long Covid neural damage on a typical MRI but when you do autopsies you find a host of problems including complete viral RNA and intrusion of the immune system that shouldn't be there. Given the similar presentation of Havana syndrome to ME/CFS it would seem sensible to look for some of the similar markers of vascular brain damage with the process developed there by Jared Younger and we will likely find a similar type of brain abnormalities. Just because it doesn't appear on MRI doesn't mean its the only type of test that can be done to find abnormalities in the brain, there are a lot of possibilities for further tests in similar presentations of symptoms.
- ineedaj0b 3y ago
  I have heard you can see long Covid on an MRI. There will be more papers on it in the future
- oldstrangers 3y ago
  Very unrelated but if anyone reading this is dealing with long covid/brain fog related symptoms, try famotidine (pepcid).
  - treyd 3y ago
    What's the justification for this recommendation? I find this really curious since I had some stomach acid issues that started during the pandemic (like, perhaps late 2020) that I assumed were stress related. I don't remember actually getting COVID in that time span (my uni was testing us every 3 days so I would have noticed if I had it around then). My primary care prescribed me famotidine for it in ~2022 which helped for a while. I still take it regularly but I did a 90 run of omeprazole last year.

jmyeet 3y ago

Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please. Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it. So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve? With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]). Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3]. Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded. So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA). [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-officers-who-hit-their-wives-or-girlfriends/380329/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-... [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police-top-line-of-duty-death-usa-2022 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police...

immibis 3y ago
This sort of thing isn't unheard of. It's not like the USA wouldn't do the same to diplomats from other countries if it wanted to. It's not like every pair of nearby embassies and the host country don't have various radio beams pointed at each other all the time. You can easily imagine at least one simple possibility: Cuba replicated The Thing and is using a microwave beam to power it which is too strong.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

richardgreeko84 3y ago

[flagged]

111111101101 3y ago
It seems to be a uniquely American thing. In my country at least (Australia), anything that benefits the common man isn't labelled as communism. It's probably related to hysteria induced by McCarthyism.
- ineedaj0b 3y ago
  Australia is particularly strange. The US tries hard to paint democracy as a positive world wide. I would imagine the CCP would paint themselves a good position too. If you were in a position of power in the CCP, who wouldn’t push for positive propaganda to all nearby territories? All innocent Australians should realize they are consuming proChinese and proAmerican /foreign/ propaganda. I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. The US is busy with Russia and Europe and likely will be for the next 10-15 years
  - whoopdedo 3y ago
    > I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. It's in their interest to influence Australian politicians since that's where all the TLAs intercept Chinese communications from.
  - maxcoder4 3y ago
    >I would argue the Chinese are focusing more resources in Australia compared to the US. What are your sources? All declassified documents that I know of suggest otherwise. For example UK's Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament report titled "China" almost starts with "China sees almost all of its global activity in the context of its struggle with the US".
immibis 3y ago
It is, but Havana Syndrome doesn't seem to have much to do with communism. Every country spies on every other country - even allies - and embassies are good places to do that - so there are all sorts of radio beams flying around those areas. The simplest hypothesis is that one of them accidentally also interacts with humans and Cuba doesn't really care much to fix it (wouldn't blame them).

vaidhy 3y ago

[flagged]

sandworm101 3y ago
Downvoting individual posts on HN? That has to be the lowest job possible in the CIA. If you are reading this, I feel your pain. I too have had crap jobs that required humiliating work.
kristopolous 3y ago
afaik posts can't get downvotes on hn, only comments. My karma is north of 14k. Maybe I haven't unlocked some undocumented downvote privilege, but if it exists, it's certainly not public and the barrier to entry is quite high.
- frame_ranger 3y ago
  [flagged]
- vaidhy 3y ago
  You are right.. I meant comments.
tomoyoirl 3y ago
Perhaps because they’re approaching the matter with flippant dismissals that it’s “made up” and invoking the Cold War with shallow accusations that it’s anti communist propaganda — rather than anything that resembles discourse on why we ought believe this to be the case. (Postscript) In contrast, the one which raises the possibility of hypochondria and burnout is still at the top in my browser; it seems adequately skeptical, but doesn’t appear to be radically downvoted like the others, presumably because there’s more content to it.

urduntupu 3y ago

[flagged]

someotherperson 3y ago

I'm waiting for it to turn out to be something stupid like highly lead-contaminated cutlery, furniture and other things. Or maybe some sort of pesticide or insecticide being sprayed on or around the building.

roxgib 3y ago
Can't speak to pesticides, but lead would have been detected in blood tests
applied_heat 3y ago
One study did identify heavy pesticide use due to concerns about Zika virus and measured changes in people’s brains before and after their trips to Cuba: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-enqu%C3%AAte-1.5288609 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...
bjourne 3y ago
It was the sound of crickets: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-syndrome-crickets-not-microwaves-report-1235163/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-s...

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

People like to believe in medical "certainty". This kind of headline is just a symptom of that. All this headline really means is that it has failed to find where the abnormalities are, but we translate not finding brain abnormalities, to there being none. This is why you need to be your own advocate when it comes to your health, you can't allow yourself to be talked down because some arbitrary test tells you you're not experiencing what you are. Unfortunately, most people only find this out the hard way.

stonedge 3y ago

There was an episode of the German Krimi series Tatort yesterday that had a plot that centered around Havana Syndrome.

richardgreeko84 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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geor9e 3y ago

There have been a lot of "mass-hysteria" events in history, but we never seem to develop good strategies to detect it, other than years later historians saying "we never really found a shred of evidence…"

rapjr9 3y ago

I find a few issues with the study paper: The papers results section says: Results Among the 81 participants with AHIs, the mean (SD) age was 42 (9) years and 49% were female; among the 48 control participants, the mean (SD) age was 43 (11) years and 42% were female. Imaging scans were performed as early as 14 days after experiencing AHIs with a median delay period of 80 (IQR, 36-544) days. After adjustment for multiple comparisons, no significant differences between participants with AHIs and control participants were found for any MRI modality. At an unadjusted threshold (Pless than .05), compared with control participants, participants with AHIs had lower intranetwork connectivity in the salience networks, a larger corpus callosum, and diffusion MRI differences in the corpus callosum, superior longitudinal fasciculus, cingulum, inferior cerebellar peduncle, and amygdala. The structural MRI measurements were highly reproducible (median coefficient of variation less than 1% across all global volumetric ROIs and less than 1.5% for all white matter ROIs for diffusion metrics). Even individuals with large differences from control participants exhibited stable longitudinal results (typically, less than ±1% across visits), suggesting the absence of evolving lesions. The relationships between the imaging and clinical variables were weak (median Spearman =0.10). The study did not replicate the results of a previously published investigation of AHIs. So it seems they did find large differences, but the differences did not change which they interpret as "the absence of evolving lesions" and hence nothing to worry about. If this was one time damage from exposure to something why would they expect evolving lesions? How can they ignore the large differences they did find compared to the control subjects? Also they say they started the study in 2018, but the original cases started in 2016, so based on their subject selection criteria their results only apply to people who reported AHIs in later years.