Remember the news about a potential “health attack” against American diplomats stationed in Cuba in 2016? Well, something seems to have happened to those diplomats’ brains — it’s just not clear what, exactly.
Flashback: In 2017, dozens of American diplomats who had been working in Havana began reporting unusual symptoms such as persistent headaches, hearing loss and blurred vision.
The initial fear was that they had been victims of a “sonic attack,” perhaps using some kind of microwave technology.
But other scientists subsequently cast doubt on that possibility, suggesting instead that it might have been a case of mass hysteria.
Whatever happened, it probably isn’t simply psychosomatic, according to a new clinical evaluation of 40 of the affected diplomats. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
MRIs of the diplomats’ brains showed differences between the diplomats’ brains and a control group’s brains, but the study doesn’t reach any conclusions about how those differences came to be.
The bottom line: "All you can say is something happened, which caused their brain to change," Ragini Verma, a professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors, told NPR.
