In 2016, a U.S. diplomat began suffering from a bewildering array of neurological symptoms officially known as “unusual health incidents.”” (AHI) and is widely branded as “Havana syndrome”. First reported in Cuba, it later spread to US diplomatic missions around the world. Their most popular explanation was that medicine faced a new disease created by a “directed energy” weapon used by an unknown enemy. The story was enthusiastically received by news reports and some US government officials, but faced skepticism from many scientists and a stalemate ensued for years.
However, on March 1, seven US intelligence agencies released updated AHI assessments. This essentially rejected the notion that these illnesses resulted from attacks by foreign enemies or were caused by directed energy weapons. This assessment also rejected the notion that AHI is the manifestation of a single, identifiable syndrome. This is a criticism made by some researchers when the syndrome was first declared. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, these conclusions were reached after medical review of more than 1,000 cases, extensive investigations, surveillance, laboratory reports, and evaluation of various sources. One can only imagine the resources mobilized to thoroughly evaluate these real yet puzzling health complaints.
The story of Havana Syndrome is a spectacular failure of science, one with serious consequences for both patients and international relations, and reveals how medical evidence is warped under political pressure. It is disturbing that the scientifically unreliable story about AHI has persisted for almost seven years. The story not only misinformed the public, but also distorted U.S. policy-making and, most importantly, deepened patient suffering. How could you avoid anxiety and despair when authorities told you that your illness was the result of an attack by a mysterious weapon that caused an unknown disease? did you enable it?
The first failure itself is mentioned in a recently released Intelligence Assessment. This is a well-known problem: confirmation bias, where people only find what they want to find. Early medical research uncritically accepted that disease is unlikely to be explained by natural or environmental factors. They also hypothesized that the reported symptoms established the existence of a genuine new condition resembling traumatic brain injury, but with no apparent damage. As a point, interpreted the medical results accordingly. Intelligence Assessment also recognized that “a combination of medical and academic criticisms pointed to methodological limitations” in their first study. According to the assessment, current medical research offers a different interpretation, with environmental factors (such as stress) and pre-existing medical conditions playing important roles in symptoms.
A second failure was to dismiss opinions and evidence that did not fit the original explanation. From 2018, jam published two flawed articles proposing this new brain disorder. These first medical reports and the idea of an energy weapon were met with skepticism and opposition by many scientists. Serious errors in the analysis of neuropsychological and neuroimaging data were evident. These debates were essentially sidelined by US Senate hearings and the press that published the study while downplaying the objections. The official US government travel advisory uncritically endorsed (and linked to) his one of these articles to scare visitors away from Cuba.
The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) convened a panel of scientific experts in 2020 to comprehensively evaluate AHI. The final panel report had at least two major issues. First, it set aside the arguments of scientists who believed that a directed energy weapon attack was impractical. Second, they concluded that pulsed microwaves were the ‘most plausible’ (easily confused with ‘most likely’ in news articles) explanation for neurological symptoms. The NASEM report discounts most of the reported neuroimaging findings, neuropsychological examinations, and clinical examinations of US diplomats used to assert the existence of the new syndrome. No evidence of microwave weapons at AHI was present in the NASEM report. Some of the researchers who initially explained the microwave effects cited in the report (who were not present at the panel) later disagreed that microwaves could explain AHI. A careful and thorough investigation by the government’s long-standing Scientific Advisory Board concluded in 2018 that “directed energy sources” were the implausible cause of AHI. The report was shelved by the NASEM report’s sponsor, the US Department of State, but NASEM did not share it with the panel, and it was published three years later.
Lack of scientific involvement was the third failure that allowed AHI misinterpretation to thrive. Given that the first case was reported in Havana, the Cuban Academy of Sciences (CAS) created an interdisciplinary panel of experts to review all publicly available reports and the regions where they are believed to have originated. Carefully examined the health surveys of Her six members of this panel (including myself) met with State Department medical personnel in Washington, D.C. in September 2018. I didn’t meet This exchange was conceived as the first of several encounters. Subsequent discussions ignored the Cuban academy, despite its interest in cooperating with US institutions. In contrast, CAS’s engagement with Canadian authorities and medical researchers studying her reports of AHI in several citizens has been active and productive. Interestingly, the CAS report (published online in December 2021) largely agrees with assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, despite different sources and possibly different initial assumptions. is to be Attacks by foreign agents were unlikely. AHI was not an identifiable syndrome but a collection of various medical conditions, some of which were pre-existing conditions. It wasn’t the syndrome, nor was it from Havana.
We can all learn something from this story. The errors of confirmation bias (fitting data to unverified assumptions), setting aside inconvenient arguments, and lack of engagement with all stakeholders can always recur. It is human to make mistakes. Biased intake of scientific information can lead to misguided policy decisions that can hurt many people. Science has a tendency to self-correct, but we need protection, especially when it doesn’t give us the answers we want.
