Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report: Havana Syndrome: Better Patient Communication and Monitoring of Key DOD Tasks Needed to Better Ensure Timely Treatment GAO-24-106593, July 29, 2024
In 2016, U.S. Embassy staff and their families in Havana, Cuba, suddenly began having symptoms such as head pain, tinnitus, blurry vision, vertigo, and more. These symptoms, once called “Havana Syndrome,” have since been reported by personnel around the world and are now called “anomalous health incidents.”
Laws require DOD to treat current and former federal employees and family members diagnosed with this poorly understood condition. But many of these people have said it’s hard to access care in a military health system they aren’t familiar with.
The GAO is making six recommendations to DOD, including that DOD develop written guidance, establish a mechanism for official communication with AHI patients, implement its AHI care cell, monitor initiatives, and create a plan to gather registry consent from patients who have left the MHS.
GAO Report
Background:
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Report “An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies” commissioned by the US State Department was released by a committee of 19 experts citing “directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy” as “the most plausible mechanism” to explain the mystery illness suffered by U.S. Embassy personnel. The New York Times describes how the report “provides the most definitive explanation yet of the illness that struck scores of government employees, first at the U.S. Embassy in Havana in 2016, and then in China and other countries. Many of the officers suffered from dizziness, fatigue, headaches, and loss of hearing, memory, and balance, and some were forced into permanent retirement.”
In March 2018, JAMA published a study on the diplomats as they experienced the following symptoms:
- 43% had MRI result finding of T2 hyperintensity (bright-foci) in the white matter,
- 76% had headaches,
- 57% had nervousness,
- 76% had memory problems,
- 71% had impaired concentration,
- 67% feeling cognitively slowed,
- 86% had sleep problems, and
- 67% had irritability.
In 2018, Dr. Beatrice Golomb shared with the US State Department her published paper, “Diplomats’ Mystery Illness and Pulsed Radiofrequency/Microwave Radiation,” which states, “A tremendous number of physicians and scientists and entities and scientific studies and government reports, in many nations, over many decades, have identified that RF/MW causes symptoms consistent with the spectrum now described for diplomats.” Her paper concludes that “reported facts appear consistent with radiofrequency microwave as the source of injury in diplomats in Cuba. Non-diplomats citing symptoms from radiofrequency microwave, often with an inciting pulsed-radiofrequency microwave exposure, report compatible health conditions.”
Wireless devices from cell phones, to baby monitors to Wi-Fi speakers and cell towers all emit pulsed radiofrequency microwave radiation. Although the levels emitted are lower than ICNIRP and FCC limits, they have been found to cause adverse effects in thousands of research studies that have found memory deficits, behavioral problems, brain cancer, breast cancer, DNA damage, and headaches.
