Two new medical studies have found that US government officials suffering from Havana syndrome symptoms did not show any discernible physical damage or alteration.
One of the studies published on Monday by the federally funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) examined brain imaging, while the other looked at blood biomarkers and clinical assessments of hearing, vision, hand-eye coordination, cognitive ability and balance.
Neither study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, detected any significant differences between a control group, and about 80 current or former US government officials suffering from a cluster of symptoms, often debilitating, known as Havana syndrome, named for the site of the first recorded cases among diplomats and intelligence officials in 2015.
Since then, hundreds of cases have been reported, mostly among US officials posted abroad, leading to theories that they had been targeted by a hitherto unknown weapon using directed energy of some sort wielded by a hostile power. Official studies and statements on what the government has called “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) have given varying assessments on the probability such a weapon was involved.
A lawyer for several of the Havana syndrome patients said that the tests did not say anything new about the phenomenon and alleged that the way the studies were conducted raised ethical questions.
The NIH neuroimaging study found that “there were no significant differences in imaging measures of brain structure or function between individuals reporting AHIs and matched control participants after adjustment for multiple comparisons.”
It added however: “That this study did not identify a neuroimaging signature of brain injury in this AHI cohort does not detract from the
