Home English News Unanswered questions loom over Biden administration push to strengthen ‘Havana Syndrome’ response

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Unanswered questions loom over Biden administration push to strengthen ‘Havana Syndrome’ response

December 16, 2021

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The Biden administration is scrambling to develop plans for providing compensation and improved medical care to diplomats, intelligence officers and other personnel affected by mysterious health incidents, part of an attempt to strengthen the response to a phenomenon known as “Havana Syndrome.”

But the evolving effort to deal with the episodes, which have spanned the globe and generated fears of stealth foreign attacks, is complicated by officials’ inability to establish a clear diagnosis for a spate of symptoms that while sometimes debilitating are also common, and to identify who or what is causing them.

Officials have detected no patterns among apparent victims in their effort to better understand and attribute the incidents, despite an extensive, ongoing investigation by the government, which includes the CIA and other agencies, according to officials. And, deepening the mystery, most of those who do report symptoms — labeled anomalous health incidents (AHI) by the government — turn out to have some other identifiable condition. By MISSY RYAN AND SHANE HARRIS .