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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a conspiracy theory because the CIA spent 20 years trying to find any effects on health and failed, because medical research spent 50 years trying to find a way how non-heating, non-ionizing radiation could have ill effects on health, and because RF fields to power passive spy devices has been demonstrated many times. Anyone believing at this point that a microwave signal weaker than the leakage of a microwave oven was design to hurt people at the embassy is at the level of a conspiracy theory.
There is no scientific basis for the theory, there are decades of research failing to find either a theoretical or empirical basis, while there are other plausible and precedented hypotheses. Every single example you provided however, was immediately technically plausible at the very least. So yes, the theory it was somehow detrimental to the health of the embassy staff is essentially a conspiracy theory. There is nothing behind it beyond motivated reasoning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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…"
> 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.
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.
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.
Somebody linked a study showing an effect. For a bit of intuition:
A lot of the negative effects of covid are from our immune response and general long-term swelling and inflammation. Pepcid is a pretty safe histamine blocker, suppressing some of that initial broad-spectrum inflammatory response.
Recently I had a pretty bad poison oak problem, and in addition to the normal things (steroids, antibiotics, ...), the doctor strongly suggested allegra+pepcid for a similar reason.
Related, my gut instinct would be that benadryl would have similar effects on long-covid patients (though that might be hard to test given the induced drowsiness from the drug).
"However, studies have shown that famotidine is not effective in reducing mortality or improving recovery in COVID-19 patients.[38]"
Borrell B (26 April 2020). "New York clinical trial quietly tests heartburn remedy against coronavirus". Science Magazine.
A lot of Long Covid seems to be related to mitochondrial damage. You'd probably be better off getting some creatine (which is commonly available because weightlifters use it) and seeing if that helps. Creatine is at least well documented to improve mitochondrial funciton.
Because Mast cell activation syndrome is a common outcome and antihistamines can reduce the impact and gradually calm the gut inflammation process down and quite a lot of Long Covid patients feel better on it.
I'm specifically referring to long covid neurological symptoms like brain fog. Not hospitalization rates, mortality, or whatever measure of recovery most studies of severe patients would be concerned with.
You can be scanned every way with different frequencies or methods and still not find a cause for migraines. Then find it can be stress, referred pain, or many other things.
Use the medicines to fix many issues and the mechanism for its action is unknown yet produces a positive outcome. This affected a handful of people yet gets a lot of attention like shark attacks versus drowning.
Any topics that are outside of the programming space are getting significantly worse for comments to where it’s becoming a waste of time to refute them or even acknowledge that they are trolls.
Not bothering to look into it would be "absence of evidence".
Extensive looking into it and finding nothing much across many different people and many different scans by many different researchers is a form of evidence.
We can actually do a very good job at detecting damage to very tiny structures in the brain. The only problem is the brain needs to be removed from the patient and then sliced very thinly before it can be imaged.
Or just evidence that there were none in this case.
If a bunch of scientists and astronomers directed their best instruments at finding a teacup orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mercury because a small number of people insisted it was there, but never locate it, the more reasonable conclusion wouldn't be that we're not good at finding orbiting teacups. It would be that assertions of its existence were based on bad reasoning.
This is a cop out argument in my opinion because you can never prove a negative. This is just more FUD. You can just always make this argument even if all evidence points to the contrary. "Well you just haven't found the right evidence yet." Right....
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).
>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.
Crime was very high in the 1990s though and it's regulation wasn't from a sudden "panic" but a steady growth from 1950 as it climbed from 5 deaths by homicide per 100,000 in 1950 to 10.4 in 1980 and 9.4 in 1990.[0] If anything there is more "mania" about semiautomatic weapons which have contributed a minuscule amount to these deaths. But I don't think discussing either issue in terms of who has more mania is helpful in any event.
Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
true but even a murder rate of 5 is high compared to Europe and this is likely due in large part to guns largely being illegal there (except for Switzerland and seemingly also Finland)
Lack of community, the break up of the nuclear family (i.e. more single parents=less child supervision), loneliness, mental illness and drug induced mental illness, inadequate access to mental and/or health care, and lack of any unified/mass culture that would set standards for behavior. Go checkout other countries that have a few of those things and you really will not find the rates of gun violence we have. Also, most of the gun crime seems to be black on black crimes, but it's taboo to even bring up racial differences without someone accusing you of being some Charles Murray-esque racist (even if you're just citing publicly available data).
>I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
The FBI'S Uniform Crime Statistics (last published for 2022, 1) break down homicide rates and numbers by demographics. Some reasons for the higher murder rates are right there in easily discernible patterns that have little to do with guns specifically. A majority of homicide is black on black crime among younger men, (though there'es no shortage of white offenders in the same age and gender group, bear in mind the population differential for the country) and it occurs across many states regardless of those states specific gun laws, or those of the municipalities in which these homicides occur.
The above is considered by many to be extremely politically incorrect, even racist, but it is what the numbers clearly show based on minutely collected data. We can argue about socioeconomic and other social or political factors causing such homicide numbers in that demographic, but since the focus here is on guns as a possible cause of murder (a rather absurd idea since guns are inert objects unless made to cause harm by a human), that's a different argument.
Also, if you look at a breakdown of U.S. states with the most guns per capita, and another one of U.S. states with the highest homicide rates. They don't match, indicating that it's not simply "the guns".
> Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.
Could it be an urban/rural thing? I'm sure the US population was proportionally far more rural/small town in 1950 than today (on clear display from so many small towns depopulating).
That is a really profound point. I also bet people are a lot less likely to try something when every male over 18 has basically been trained in combat AND is healthy and fit...
I agree with pretty much everything except for this:
>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.
I see 'crime' all over now... it just isn't considered a crime now that it's been decriminalized. 20-30 years ago, I never ever saw open drug sales and drug use, open prostitution, mass looting/shoplifting, deaths from overdoses are exponentially worse, car break ins constantly, etc. And I do agree with the copaganda arguments in general, but I just can't align how much visible crime is all over the West Coast and this vague notion that crime isn't getting worse. Yeah, maybe if you're only tracking murders... but everything else is so much worse and our kids will be exposed to things we never saw until we were well past adulthood.
This is anecdotal. The data just doesn't back it up (eg [1]). You've brought up a number of issues As for retail theft, even the Walgreens CEO had to admit the problem was overstated [2]. There are a bunch of reasons for it. One is the crime narrative. Another is its easier for companies to blame theft rather than poor inventory management and retail operations.
When you say you "see" crime everywhere, I suspect you mean it's all over your [social media of choice]. Today everyone has a camera.
Another example is kidnapping. It wasn't that long ago we had the generation with TV ads asking parents if they knew where their kids were and telling them to come home when the street lights came on. Now? There's a completely overblown fear of kidnappings. We hear figures of >800K children being reported missing a year. Almost all of them are custody issues. Stranger kidnappings are more like ~8/year [3].
Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.
No, I mean I see it with my own eyes when I walk/drive the same streets of California I have my entire life. When I was a kid, I would go to the skatepark at 10 years old and be there all day and basically have zero parent supervision and it was 'safe'. There was only one homeless person who was basically an older guy who pushed around a TV and plugged it in at various public outlets. Now, I go to the same public places and they are literally infested with fentanyl zombies who are stripping the copper wire out of the street lights... I see prostitutes walking the streets in public half naked in LA. If you have lived in SF, LA, Sacramento, or any of the other major metro areas--you can see it with your own eyes. It simply wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the early 2000s.
>Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.
Sure, but I just want to be able to walk in public and feel safe. That has all rapidly changed since Prop 47 passed in 2014. The entire west coast of America is in rapid decline and it's incredibly apparent--just look at any underpass or freeway offramp. Go to east Oakland and check out the Mad Max style homeless camps--it's not something that was there in 2001. I had a bullet come through my bathroom wall in SF and SFPD threw it in a sandwich baggie and never called me or did any investigation. I had multiple trespassers at my apartment building but SFPD never did anything until I finally got a restraining order... but they'd only remove them and then they'd come right back. When my grandpa died a few years ago, within a few days squatters somehow found out and moved in. Things are pretty objectively worse than they were 20 years ago. And all the stats are juked and tweaked because cops won't arrest, juries won't convict, and judges won't sentence criminals in California. The statistics are just fake at that point.
I blame it on the rise of fentanyl and meth. Drugs are cheaper than ever and more widely available due to decriminalization.
This is all correct. Stats lie. Crime is an extremely localized issue, so it's easy for people to handwave away if they are in an area that doesn't experience it.
Using the 30 year statistic as proof there’s no crime is extreme dishonesty. You’re taking about the tail end of the crack epidemic which saw some of the worst crime in our nations history. Further, this is true on average but people in major cities have seen a rise in crime with a city like Seattle having its highest rates in a generation. Even cities like SF have not recovered to pre-Covid levels.
> Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story.
There is a lot of bullshit around it, sure, but no one seem to dispute the reality of the symptoms. It may be psychosomatic, and I honestly think it is the most likely explanation, but it doesn't solve the problem. If diplomats in Cuba went crazy, then why did they go crazy? Diplomats are people and I prefer when people don't get crazy.
Somebody here suggested a form of burnout, fine, then why did people in Cuba burn out? Burnout is not BS, and maybe something has to be done about the work conditions. And maybe, with that knowledge, if similar symptoms appear elsewhere, it would be a good occasion to send an work inspector.
How is this any different than a placebo effect? You could give everyone a sugar pill and then if a few people started complaining about the side effects, another 30-40% would quickly follow. The human brain is incredibly susceptible to group think. I can't remember the exact psychological experiment, but I remember learning about how they did an experiment where they'd have a group look at pictures of things to define a color (i.e. the apple is red or green, the milk is white) and there would be person involved who was a collaborator with the study and would be loud and vocal, but every now and then make an obvious mistake (the dot would be orange, they'd say it was yellow) and other people would just agree with them since the other times they were right so the non-collaborators would actually change their answer from what they saw with their own eyes, to something they didn't but was just suggested by the defacto loudmouth in the group.
But the prospect you raise is maybe one of the scariest and lends itself well to conspiracies. It can mean someone, maybe deliberately, caused some mysterious illness among diplomats, through suggestion alone, causing international tension. Not my hypothesis of choice, but it may actually be a more plausible conspiracy theory than sonic weapons.
Something happened, and something caused it. Just saying "it is a placebo effect" is dismissive. If it is a placebo effect, then where are the sugar pills? Who is the "loud and vocal collaborator"?
It made more than a thousand people sick, I think it shouldn't be dismissed, so that these people can get better, and to prevent others from suffering the same problems. Knowing the cause, be it psychological or physical, would certainly help.
the fact that it affected 1000 people doesn't really matter. all you really have to do is explain the first 2, which can be something as benign as a social hypochondriac woke up with a headache.
It matters to those 1000. And explaining the first 2 is indeed all we need to do, but it hasn't been done yet. If it is just a social hypochondriac with a headache, fine, it is perfectly good explanation that will help treat these 1000 people and maybe take steps to limit damage caused by social hypochondriacs in embassies.
I bet it had to do with the 'Trump is a Russian agent propaganda' we were all fed for the last 8 years. Probably made people who were actually working for the government in risky positions abroad (i.e. Cuba vs Netherlands) super paranoid and vulnerable. I mean, wasn't it also Rachel Maddow who covered all this Havana Syndrome the most? I truly wonder how many people who had Havana Syndrome were watching MSNBC for hours a day.
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.
Probably this nonsense:
>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.
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.
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
>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".
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).
> Havana Syndrome doesn't seem to have much to do with communism
Of course, this is actually about Unitary Marxist–Leninist one-party semi-presidential socialist republics, not communism.
> 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
No, that's by far the most complicated possible explanation. You can measure radio waves, and they did, and they're normal. We also know how radio waves interact with humans, and it doesn't cause Havana syndrome. Radio waves have a frequency, and all of those frequencies have been known and categorized and studied for many decades.
Its seriously a million times more likely that someone has found the brown note and left it playing on a laptop in the conference room. That's how insane it is to say that there's a radio beam that is accidentally interacting with humans and causing these supposed symptoms.
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.
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.
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.
