Havana Syndrome: U.S. and Canadian diplomats targeted with possible weapon causing brain injury and neurological symptoms

Summary

Author doesn't believe existing explanations (which are admittedly unusual) for observed symptoms (fatigue, brain fog, etc.). Therefore it is likely "functional disorder", which I think means "it is something, but we don't know what it is". Only interview people who agree with FD. Plus ~5000 words.

@dave30th --what is your opinion of this journalism?

 

The same thing happened to Canadian diplomats living in Cuba.

 

If you interject a biowarfare component to a conversation such as this five or ten years ago, you would be dismissed. Today, there'd be friction, but ears are listening.

 

It's notable that the discussion about Jason Lindsley is well, somewhat different to what was presented in the article..

https://lancasteronline.com/news/lo...cle_92334e98-a6e7-11e6-aaf5-c3f4a7a463d1.html

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1128968820864028675


https://twitter.com/user/status/1128970123400941568

 

Obviously a favourite theme of the author. Here he is on MUS in 2006

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/22/health/22symp.html

 

This article was all over the place for me. It talked about finding inner-ear damage and refers to positive neurological tests, then goes into functional disorders and mass psychogenic illness.

In any case, I think 'functional neurological disorder' is potentially a great category, but so many people pine for it to be a validation of 'psychogenesis' that they've spoiled a perfectly good descriptive bucket.

Who knows what happened to these people.

But the mass psychogenic illness proponents have to ask themselves how (if this is what they think it is - a bunch of perfectly normal diplomatic staff and family members developing some sort of communicable hysteria triggered by some buzzing and pulsing sounds) is most everybody not always completely crippled by these things?

 

I have exactly the problems you describe. One early name for ME was epidemic vertigo so it was always a symptom in many people. I have damaged proprioception found by a positive Romberg's test where you lose your balance or fall completely if you close your eyes. This was once suggested as part of a suite of diagnostic tests it was considered so common. (It's not a case you don't have ME if it is negative, I should stress)

Basically In ME there is damage to the brain and other organs so the symptoms would match those of other diseases where there is brain damage but it is the process that caused the damage that determines the disease. Take something like gangrene of the toes, one symptom but it can be caused by tetanus or heart disease or diabetes among other things.

There is very little decent evidence for mass hysteria. It is possible that if everyone in your office is going down with flu, sneezing in a dusty room might make you think you had caught it and go to bed early with a hot toddy but major, life affecting, serious disease is another thing all together.

 

Come to think of it, something that would create such permanent symptoms in your victims is the ultimate weapon: it won't even be acknowledged as an attack.

You still hurt your victim, you incapacitate them fully, in fact. If someone was asking hard questions, they won't anymore as no one will trust their judgment because physicians will insist there is nothing medically wrong with them. You accomplish your aims, you scare people. But the victims are blamed for it and no one wants to dig further because of the belief system around hysteria.

This would seriously be the most ingenious form of attack ever created: it will be denied by everyone but the victims, who will be marginalized and forced into silence. It leverages a fundamental flaw in medicine, one that goes unquestioned because so much sunk cost has been invested in insisting so.

Forget chemical warfare and lethal biological agents. This method is full-proof and anyone questioning it will be sternly warned against contradicting medical experts. And since the victims don't die, there is no escalation or retaliation, another flaw in medicine where the only possible harm that counts is death as a direct result. Nobody really cares about people being incapacitated in a way they can't measure. Even 99% incapacitation doesn't register basic sympathy.

If it's not exactly what's happening here, it's really only a matter of time before someone exploits it. It would take a massive, seemingly impossible, paradigm shift in medicine to see through it, which is unlikely to happen any time soon.

 

You've touched upon one of the main talking points set forth in Kris Newby's new book. Except she does not explore lethal bioweapons. She looks at the US government's efforts to develop non-lethal bioagents, agents of incapacitation, over a 25-year period immediately following WWII. Those microbial agents were being designed so normal immune system responses would be blunted, and the agents themselves would be difficult if not impossible to identify - this way, the country being "attacked" could not point the finger at the US.They might not even realize they were being attacked. Just larges swaths of the population would come down with a sickness they could not identify that left them disabled.

And, depending on the culture, disbelieved.

 

I don't claim to know what illness Cuban staff had, but any debate on topic needs to be informed by new 'whole brain' understanding of functional disorders such as PPPD and not by outdated prejudice

That seems pretty much silly point scoring. And on the S4ME gold standard scale that would be -3 points.

Why not say it needs to be informed by a humble admission that nobody has a clue?

 

The "loud crickets" explanation seems to make no sense because then there would be a lot of similar cases and we wouldn't be wondering what it was.

 

Diplomats in China are now also reporting this.

 

This is their latest review (Jon Stone and friends) (I guess no one informed them about how inappropriate their analogy is):
Structural alterations in functional neurological disorder and related conditions: a software and hardware problem)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158219301482

Unfortunately almost all of the findings seem to be inconsistent or not replicated.

 

Reminds me of this speculative paper:
https://spqr.eecs.umich.edu/papers/YanFuXu-Cuba-CSE-TR-001-18.pdf

Claims it may be consequences of some sort of elaborate eavesdropping device. I'm not sure how credible that is though...

https://theconversation.com/can-sound-be-used-as-a-weapon-4-questions-answered-83627
https://qz.com/1288135/the-sonic-at...ere-probably-clumsy-ultrasonic-eavesdropping/

 

I think the use of the term functional means whatever the diagnosing practitioner wants it to mean. Several years back there was some communication uncovered from a well known psychiatrist to another gleefully commenting on how wonderful and useful the term is because doctors could use it and understand between each other what they meant by it, while at the same time giving patients a different understanding that the doctors were taking their condition seriously. Apparently some doctors got the memo and some didn’t. So some doctors use it to mean there is something wrong with the function of an organ or system but they don’t know why and haven’t found any physical damage, others use it (similarly to MUS) to mean there is nothing physically wrong and the cause is psychogenic.

I have a friend who developed unexplained seizures who was given the diagnosis Functional Neurological Disorder and a referral to a psychologist.

 

Unfortunately so. But I think the practical point here is that we do need decent terms for conditions that we don't understand or understand only to the extent that we have good reason to think they're happening on a 'finer' level than scan-visible lesions (the 'software vs hardware' analogy). People seem to be sullying all of the less tortured, plainly descriptive terminology - 'functional', 'medically unexplained'. At some point you run out of reasonable terms and reasonable people just have to use reasonable terms reasonably to the point where they're understood reasonably and can be reclaimed. Medically unexplained should, and can, just mean 'we don't know', functional should, and can, just mean something like 'structures normal but function bad' without freudian implications.

Maybe that's a bit optimistic but I feel like most six-year-olds could hack it.

 

I think that we recently discussed this issue on a thread where NICE had expressly stated that for their current purposes functional meant of psychogenic origin.

 

Here are some more Jon Stone doozies:

"Trick or treat? Showing patients with functional (psychogenic) motor symptoms their physical signs."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22764261
followup: https://n.neurology.org/content/80/9/869.1.long

"From psychogenic movement disorder to functional movement disorder: It's time to change the name"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mds.25562

and an old article on diagnosis of Functional weakness diagnosis with a certain M Sharpe.
https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/73/3/241

 

Surely that's deliberate deception?

Redefining a word to mean something different from what the general population means by it.

Doctors should at least be honest with their patients.

They should not deliberately try and deceive them.

If they think I'm a fruitcake they should say so, and then we can discuss what type of cheese would be best going forward.

They shouldn't tell people lies, as this could be seen as undermining trust between doctor and patient.

If they not only can't see this, but think that deliberately lying to their patients is something to crow about, it might be time to question who the fruitcake is.