There Is No Physical Source No Scientific Explanation for This
Cubans claim for cooperation on alleged health incidents with US diplomats fell on deaf ears
Even if it looked like a science fiction story, Cuban authorities took very seriously US allegations that its diplomats were injured in some way while on duty in Havana.
“We´ve examined all the evidence that has been provided, which is very scarce and very sparse”, said Dr. Mitchell Valdes-Sosa, director of Cuba’s Neurosciences Center and senior member of the Cuban Experts Committee assembled to investigate these alleged incidents. “And we looked at all possible hypothesis which could explain the symptoms described and the signs of diseases in these diplomats”.
On instructions from the senior Government, the Cuban authorities opened their own investigation as soon as they were first notified by the US State Department on February 17, 2017, that members of the American staff were suffering from hearing loss and other symptoms like nausea, heartaches and even brain concussion.
Cubans showed its willingness to collaborate more than once. Members of the US specialized agencies were invited to Cuba to conduct an on-site investigation and the FBI was allowed to undertake surveys on the ground in Havana.
In the face of countless variables in the case, influenced by the long history of conflict between the two countries, cooperation is essential. However, Cuban authorities criticized a lack of cooperation from their US counterparts.
“One of the problems that the Cuban scientific community has had is the lack of consistent and detailed information about what happened to these diplomats”, said Valdes-Sosa. “When a piece of medical evidence is mentioned, we have no context on the age or the previous history of the person it involves”.
For example, “you can say that a person has some problem with hearing”, stressed the Cuban scientist, “but you don’t know if that person previously had been exposed to loud noises”.
“We do know that some of them (US diplomats) have a military history or were involved in some sort of activities related to the Armed Forces of the United States”, said Valdés-Sosa. “The lack of details on the previous history makes it very difficult to assess those isolated facts that have been provided about the diplomats”.
Valdes-Sosa is especially critic with a paper by the University of Pennsylvania researchers published last February in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which describes a set of examinations made on a small group of the diplomats, not on all of them.
“The only piece that has something resembling scientific evidence is the JAMA paper”, said the Cuban expert. “However it has been received with harsh scientific criticism from around the world”.
What is stated in the JAMA paper is that the diplomats suffer some sort of brain concussion but without the trauma and without the concussion.
“But when you look carefully at the article, scientists from around the world have found that very strange and bizarre criteria were used to define what was abnormal on the tests”, Valdes-Sosa said. “Usually these tests have a cutoff point where you determine if the person is ill or not and these thresholds were varied, were changed and were placed at a very strange level of 40 percentile”.
“According to these criteria on any group of normal subjects, 40 percent of them would be ill”, he said.
Its claim is supported by other scientists around the world. In a set of four letters published August 14, also by JAMA, experts noted that the original study improperly interpreted some cognitive test results but failed to conduct important tests on hearing and balance.
Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist at Botany Downs Secondary College in New Zealand, also criticized the University of Pennsylvania team for discounting mass hysteria as a possible explanation for the ailments.
“This paper on the JAMA is full of symptoms or descriptions which could be consistent with psychosomatic or psychological disorders”, said Valdes-Sosa. “There is no evidence in terms of laboratory tests which really supports the idea that there is damage in the nervous system”.
“It is practically impossible to imagine what sort of physical agent could produce this kind of syndrome”.
“For sound to produce damage to the brain it would have to be at an incredibly high intensity”, stressed Valdes-Sosa. “This is impossible to produce without producing a commotion that everybody in the city would have heard”.
Any other physical agent that one can think of, he said like infrasound, ultrasound, microwaves would´ve had to be “very near to the head of the person” and it would have been “easy to detect” under any circumstances.
“It is practically impossible from the physical point of view to produce damage to the brain under the circumstances that the diplomats have reported that they started feeling ill”, Valdes-Sosa concludes. “There is no physical source no scientific explanation for this”.
Translated: Alicia Jrapko y Bill Hackwell
