A new report about the 'syndrome' appeared over the Xmas holidays:
Senate Intelligence Committee criticizes CIA’s treatment of ‘Havana syndrome’ patients (CNN, Dec 27, 2024)
US Senate report finds CIA mishandled employee cases of Havana syndrome (TheGuardian, Dec 27, 2024)
CIA 'Greatly Complicated' Havana Syndrome Treatment: Senate (Newsweek, Dec 28/31, 2024)
I think that the logical absurdity of this never-ending quest for the illusive 'syndrome' is illustrated by these lines from the report:
Review of CIA's Efforts to Provide Facilitated Medical Care and Benefits for Individuals Affected by Anomalous Health Incidents (Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, Dec 23, 2024)
Seven years after the first AHI reports in Havana, during which time the IC engaged in sustained intelligence collection and analysis efforts and medical personnel conducted various types of clinical research studies on AHI reporters, there remains no definitive answer to the question "what is an AHI?" However, there is now broad acknowledgement across the U.S. government, medical, and research communities that not all of the reported AHIs have the same cause - and that many reported AHIs are likely attributable to naturally occurring
medical conditions, environmental exposures, or psycho-social factors.In sum, the absence of
a clear case definition of AHIs, uncertainty surrounding the origin of AHIs, and CIA's evolving organizational position have greatly complicated CIA's ability to consistently and transparently facilitate medical care, provide compensation and other benefits, and communicate clearly about AHIs to the workforce.
The whole point of the term anomalous health incidents (AHI) is that the alleged syndrome consists of all kinds of symptoms bundled together because they don't correspond to any 'normal' medical condition. It's not a migraine, it's not a cold, it's not the flu, it's not vertigo, it's not anxiety, and it's not one of the many well-known vestibular conditions although all of those could become AHIs if they were accompanied by something perceived as unusual and experienced by somebody working abroad as a diplomat or a CIA agent; for instance, the sound of very loud and shrill crickets.
In other words, AHIs are defined as something that they're
not, a
negative: They are allegedly
not one of all those more or less common or rare diseases that people come down with. But now, it is demanded that this negative be defined as a positive, as what it
is instead of as what it is
not; as an
actual disease or illness, which has been attempted since 2016. As the CNN article puts it:
The
mysterious illness (!) first emerged in late 2016, when a cluster of diplomats stationed in the Cuban capital of Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma, including dizziness and extreme headaches.
It
has to be an illness, even though it obviously
isn't. And I can say that it is obvious that it isn't because of what I highlighted in the quotation from the report because
"many reported AHIs are" not merely
"likely attributable to naturally occurring medical conditions, environmental exposures, or psycho-social factors." Many (and probably the vast majority) of the reported AHIs have
actually been attributed to
"naturally occurring medical conditions, environmental exposures, or psycho-social factors." There was nothing really
anomalous about them. The only thing that was 'anomalous' was that the people who came down with them and sometimes their doctors, too, attributed them to a
weird cause, to something other than what is known to cause the respective illnesses or medical conditions. That this happened isn't in and of itself all that 'anomalous', i.e. unusual. In ordinary everyday life people ascribe their ailments to all kinds of things that doctors know aren't the actual causes. Ask any doctor about the origin stories of diseases that they hear every day from their patients, some of them more colorful than others.
It is one of those things that the 'Havana syndrome' or Anomalous Health Incidents have in common with Unidentified Flying Object (nowadays Unidentified Aerial Phenomena): It is something that hasn't been explained! It is (apparently) neither a bird nor a plane nor Superman - even though it often is one of the two former if it isn't a weather balloon or the planets Venus or Jupiter.
But for whatever reason, people want to turn the lack of explanation into a positive identification: an alien vessel ('flying saucer'), a Chinese spy drone or whatever their favourite fantasies are. And in the case of the headaches caused by the sound of the Indies short-tailed crickets in Havana: a hostile supersonic and/or DEW weapon attack.
(I've really missed that particular emoji all these years!)
By the way, this paragraph from the CNN article reminded me of something:
Examples of insufficient care outlined in the report included patients who “experienced delayed, denied, or pre-conditioned care,” including “long wait times to access facilitated treatment options; were denied facilitated care by a CIA care adjudication board; perceived that their access to facilitated medical care was contingent on their willingness to participate in a NIH clinical research study.”'
Delay, deny, de...
The Guardian also wrote about this:
Havana syndrome patients reportedly promised healthcare that never came (TheGuardian, Dec 30, 2024)
