August 31, 2024
Illustration: Cubadebate
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) reported Friday that it is ending its investigation of what is commonly known as “Havana syndrome,” a mysterious illness experienced by a number of spies, soldiers and diplomats who have reported sudden debilitating symptoms of unknown origin.
The NIH said it would end the work “out of an abundance of caution” after an internal investigation found that people had been coerced into taking part in the research.
The coercion, the agency specified, was not on its part, but NIH did not elaborate on who may have coerced participation. It noted, however, that voluntary consent is a fundamental pillar of ethical research conduct.
Some of the people who said they had previously been ill claimed that the CIA forced them to participate in the research as a prerequisite for obtaining health care.
“They wanted us to be a lab rat for a week before we received treatment at Walter Reed, and at the very least, that’s unethical and unethical and moral,” Marc Polymeropoulos told CNN in May.
Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who says he has been ill, is an advocate for those affected by what the U.S. government calls “anomalous health incidents.” He stated in May that he believes participation in this investigation was “ordered” by senior CIA commanders.
In March, the CIA issued a statement denying that people were required to participate. The agency did not respond Friday to CNN’s request for comment.
Forced participation in a study is considered highly unethical and extremely rare, according to ethics experts.
The NIH said Friday that it shared the update with JAMA, the medical journal that published two studies derived from the research in March. JAMA did not respond to CNN’s request for further comment.
The NIH said that while it halts this research, this decision does not change the conclusions.
Despite reports of symptoms from federal employees, neither study found anything definitive that could cause health problems.
In one study, NIH researchers took a closer look at the brains of people believed to have Havana syndrome and found no consistent evidence of brain lesions. There were also no significant differences between that group and a healthy control group.
In the second study, NIH scientists conducted a battery of tests on 86 U.S. government employees and family members who reported having “Havana syndrome” and compared them with 30 people who had similar jobs but no such symptoms. On most clinical and biomarker measures, they found that the two groups were the same.
In an editorial article published in JAMA in conjunction with the studies, Dr. David Relman, a professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford who worked on earlier research on this patient population, argued that although the study involving brain scans appeared to show that “nothing, or nothing serious” was occurring with these cases, drawing this conclusion “would be unwise.”
Other research has found indications of abnormalities in the brain, he said, and the same can be said of the study in which the tests were performed. Because the condition can look different from person to person, he said, doctors do not have specific tests that can fully determine what is wrong.
“Clearly, new, sensitive, standardized, noninvasive tests of nervous system function are needed, especially as they relate to the vestibular system, such as more specific blood markers for different forms of cellular injury,” Relman wrote.
The disease and its cause have remained frustratingly unclear to both the intelligence community and the medical community investigating its origin.
The disease was dubbed Havana syndrome because it emerged in late 2016 in the Cuban capital. Some U.S. diplomats reported symptoms consistent with head trauma, including dizziness and extreme headaches.
Since then, at least 1,500 cases have been reported among U.S. personnel stationed in 96 countries, officials said last year.
There was long speculation about a new type of weapon as the cause of these illnesses, but the U.S. intelligence community said last year that it could not link any cases to a foreign adversary, ruling out that the unexplained illness was the result of a campaign led by an enemy of the United States.
Source Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English