[Julesman]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/us/politics/havana-syndro....

"New Studies Find No Evidence of Brain Injury in Havana Syndrome Cases"

This story is from two weeks ago. So which is it?

[dilyevsky]

Just means they failed to find evidence with the information they had access to (which sounds like not a lot)

> Dr. David Relman, a prominent scientist who has had access to the classified files involving the cases and representatives of people suffering from Havana syndrome, said the new studies were flawed. Many brain injuries are difficult to detect with scans or blood markers, he said.

[pessimizer]

It also doesn't mean that unicorns don't exist.

[pessimizer]

It's a bunch of money being spent on on a silly story by three outlets who hoped they'd be fed enough nonsense by three letter agencies to dominate the news cycle with it for a week or two, being frontrun by a comprehensive study showing, yet again, that nothing happened to these people. So they rushed this out.

If anybody finds any factual claims about this device and this supposed syndrome, buried in the innuendo, please post it. But the boldfaced faux-abstract at the top doesn't indicate any new information at all.

[FabHK]

You're too quick to dismiss things. There's without doubt a phenomenon here (a multitude of anecdotes of sudden symptoms, with some victims "medically retired from government service"), with two theories to explain it: a) there's no underlying physical cause, but it's basically random incidences in conjunction with selection bias, or b) there's an underlying physical cause, such as outlined in the article.

These are both possibilities. The article outlines "new evidence — in the form of intercepted Russian intelligence documents, travel logs, and call metadata, along with eyewitness testimony". They don't claim to have the device itself, or direct information about it.

Next, there are some studies that find differences, and some that don't find differences between the affected and a control group. If the studies look at different markers, that is consistent with non-obvious differences being there. The absence of evidence sometimes is evidence of absence, but not always.

I think the proper response for now is to suspend judgment.

[skygazer]

The gist was members of some GRU unit have been seen at the location of several Havana syndrome events, mainly experts in Russia have been affected, and the Russian government has reportedly given awards for the creation and use of such directed energy weapons. The article makes it sound like Russia has been at war with the US since 2014, but the US hasn't realized it, yet.

[lostlogin]

I don’t understand why the imaging done in these studies isn’t more focussed on the inner ear. Maybe it’s already been rules out, but I can’t find anything that suggests it has.

Things like Ménière’s disease are a PITA to image, but it’s possible.