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[ by Charles Cameron — Reuters publishes scary stuff, should have checked their facts with WHO epidemiologists first ]
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Last time, it was the Jerusalem syndrome — this time it’s mass hysteria, not poison.

The Reuters article, Afghan girls’ school feared hit by poison gas by Folad Hamdard (upper frame, above) was posted on April 21, 2013, just one week ago.

Its key paragraphs in terms of etiology and blame are these:

As many as 74 schoolgirls in Afghanistan’s far north fell sick after smelling gas and were being examined for possible poisoning, local officials said on Sunday.

While instances of poisoning are sometimes later found to be false alarms, there have been numerous substantiated cases of mass poisonings of schoolgirls by elements of Afghanistan’s ultra-conservative society that are opposed to female education.

and:

Between May and June last year there were four poisoning attacks on a girls’ school in Takhar, prompting local officials to order principals to stay in school until late and staff to search the grounds for suspicious objects and to test the water for contaminants.

Takhar has been a hotbed of militancy and criminal activity since 2009, with groups such as the Taliban and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan active.

One wonders: Does Reuters employ fact checkers?

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One wonders because…

An Editorial Note on the 2012 article Mass Psychogenic illness in Afghanistan (lower frame, above) in the WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Monitor (Vol 5 # 22, 27 May) reads in part:

This is the fourth year where episodes of suspected mass poisoning of school girls is reported from Afghanistan. Like in the previous years the events are triggered off with one girl developing symptoms of headache, weakness, dizziness, nausea and fainting. Often these outbreaks were believed to be the work of political elements in the country who oppose girls education. Reports of stench smells preceding the appearance of symptoms have given credit to the theory of mass poisoning (chemical/bioterrorism). However, investigations into the causes of these outbreaks have yielded no such evidence so far. In the last four years over 1634 cases from 22 schools have been treated for Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI) in Afghanistan. There are no related deaths reported.

Reuters is read by a whole lot more people than some WHO epidemiological weekly, eh?

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Luckily, the NY Times at least posted a blog post by Matthieu Aikins writing from Kabul, The ‘Poisoned’ Girls of Afghanistan, by way of alerting us to the WHO report:

I’m willing to bet that there was no poison.

Over the past few years, thousands of girls have fallen victim to waves of alleged poisonings in Afghan schools. The government, media and education activists have blamed the Taliban, and the police in a number of provinces have produced the “guilty” parties, with some of them confessing on national television.

But last July when I investigated the subject for Newsweek, I discovered never-released reports showing that the United Nations, the World Health Organization and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force had investigated the incidents for years and had never found, despite extensive laboratory tests, any evidence of toxins or poisoning — a fact that may explain ISAF’s conspicuous silence on the issue.

I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

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Here’s another DoubleQuote for you:

Of course, the Taliban spokesman was addressing a 2012 outbreak of the same hysteria story, and the “no claim of responsibility” report is from one of this year’s versions.

But why would anyone claim responsibility in any case, if the actual cause is mass hysteria rather than poisoning? There’s history to these things — they didn’t begin in Afghanistan:

The cases the Afghanistan incidents most resemble are the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, in which hundreds of people, mostly schoolgirls, were overcome by fits of mirthless, extended laughter, in what is now known as Tanzania, and the West Bank fainting epidemic of 1983.

The similarities between the heavily studied epidemic in the occupied West Bank and Afghanistan are particularly striking. Both places are in a state of conflict, where political violence is a fact of life, and both have powerful local rumor mills. The incidents follow a similar pattern: First a single report of a bad smell, then a small number of girls come down with symptoms, then it spreads. Local media fueled the rumors and the incidents spread in Afghanistan, just as they did in Israel and Palestine.

Albert Hefez, Israel’s lead psychiatric investigator of the incident, wrote in his 1985 study “The Role of the Press and the Medical Community in the epidemic of ‘Mysterious Gas Poisoning’ in the Jordan West Bank” that Israeli newspaper reports of “poisoning” at the start of the epidemic added fuel to the flames. A front page article in Haaretz on March 28, 1983 even claimed that Israeli military investigators had found traces of nerve gas and quoted “army sources” as saying they suspected Palestinian militants were poisoning their own people in order to blame Israel and provoke an uprising. Palestinian leaders followed up with accusations that Israel had poisoned them in an attempt to drive them from the West Bank.

And such things don’t only happen “abroad” — as detailed in that same NYT blog post I quoted above:

The phenomenon of groups of people falling ill for psychological, rather than physical, reasons is not unknown, nor is it limited to Afghanistan. Moreover, the typical victims are school-age girls. In late 2011, when a group of girls in Le Roy, New York, fell victim to a mysterious twitching illness, medical authorities eventually concluded it was psychogenic.

[ by Charles Cameron — messianisms as madness ]
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The Economist has a fascinating piece out about Iran’s multiplicity of messiahs (lower panel, below) which reminded me strongly of the Jerusalem syndrome (upper panel).

I suspect that was “bad adab” – bad manners, not bad clothing – but never mind.

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The Economist piece is worth reading in full, if you also take the time to read Tim Furnish — who tones down the rhetoric a couple of notches:

I seriously doubt that Iranian jails are full of thousands of self-styled mahdis; I suspect many of them are guilty of nothing more eschatological than complaining too publicly about the price of gas or having too large a satellite TV antenna on their homes. But even if reduced by a factor of ten, the Islamic Republic does nonetheless appear to have a serious problem with apocalyptic antipathy toward the government. And a regime predicated, in no small part, on Mahdist ideology finds itself being hoist by its own philosophical petard.

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Meanwhile, back in Jerusalem:

In Israel, Jerusalem Syndrome is taken very seriously. Everyone involved in security, tourism, or health is on the lookout for afflicted visitors. In an average year, three or four tourists develop real, palpable Jerusalem Syndrome. In l999, more than 50 visitors were diagnosed, the increase possibly attributed to millennial activities.

Why the security concern? Well, because occasionally those afflicted try some pretty dangerous stuff. Dr Yair Bar-El wrote in The British Journal of Psychiatry (2000) 176: 86-90:

A Protestant from South America conceived a plan to destroy Islamic holy places in order to replace them with Jewish holy places. The second stage of his plan was then to destroy them in order to start the war of Gog and Magog so that the Anti-Christ would reveal himself, after which Christ would reappear. The patient succeeded in gutting one of the most holy mosques in Jerusalem. Psychiatric examination was ordered by the court, and he was diagnosed as being unable to differentiate between right and wrong, not responsible for his deeds and therefore not fit to stand trial. He was admitted to a local psychiatric institution and later transferred to a mental health institution in his own country

I think “gutting” is overstating what happened — but you can sense the risk…

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DoubleQuote Sources:

The Savvy Traveler, 2000

The Economist, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — with a little help from the Buddha, fake quotes, self-referential paradox, a pinch of salt, and two tbsps of anthropology ]
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Over the last ten days we have seen a whole lot of speculation, misinformation, spin and gossip masquerading as analysis and journalism, and that was on my mind when I ran across an alleged Buddha-quote that told me to use my common sense — and since my common sense told me there probably wasn’t a phrase in Pali, the language of the earliest Buddhist texts, that would correspond too closely to the highly idiomatic English usage, common sense, I thought I should check it out with Fake Buddha Quotes, my go-to place for checking what the Buddha is supposed to have said:

I’m pretty sure the Buddha never said “Pretty sure I never said that” too, for much the same reason.

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But what delights me most about all this is just how self-referential this all is: the Buddha allegedly warns us against trusting what we read even when it’s attributed to him, in what turns out to be a faux quote attributed to him, based on a real quote that reads (in one translation):

Any teaching should not be accepted as true for the following ten reasons: hearsay, tradition, rumor, accepted scriptures, surmise, axiom, logical reasoning, a feeling of affinity for the matter being pondered, the ability or attractiveness of the person offering the teaching, the fact that the teaching is offered by “my” teacher. Rather, the teaching should be accepted as true when one knows by direct experience that such is the case.

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Fpr what it’s worth, the abbreviated version doesn’t mean the same as the original. From Koun Franz at Sweeping Zen:

his is a very different idea. The original says we need to verify through direct experience; the popular version says that we can stand back from the practice, at a distance, and use reason to determine its authenticity.

Or this, from Bodhipaksa, the Fake Buddha Quotes guy, :

The Buddha of course isn’t saying we should jettison reason and common sense. What he’s implying is that both those things can be misleading and what’s ultimately the arbiter of what’s true is experience. It’s when you “know for yourselves” that something is true through experience that you know it’s true.

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Another comment on the same page led me to this first comment on cultures and languages —

which in turn reminded me of the second, a long-time favorite of mine from the time when I was some sort of Anthro professor in dreamy Oregon…

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And, y’lnow, both those quotes in my second pair give you a visceral sense of what today’s SWJ article by Robert R. Greene Sands and Thomas J. Haines, Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence in Intelligence Professionals is very rightly on about, though it’s all phrased in a manner so abstract you might easily miss the point…

Mitigating cognitive, cultural and a host of tradecraft biases is essential for intelligence professionals to navigate through today’s culturally complex environments. Adopting the perspective of contemporary cultural groups, including nation-states, often defies understanding because the intelligence professional is challenged to both appreciate and consequently discern meaning of behavior that is predicated on vastly different beliefs and value systems. Fundamental to this dissonance is a markedly different cultural reality resulting from different histories, traditions and the stasis of culture. The professional’s western and deeply seated worldview impedes either the analysis itself, or is perjured by the cognitive restrictions imposed by the structured analytic strategies used.

The quote about the Wintu — it’s from Dorothy Lee, Linguistic Reflection of Wintu Thought, Chapter 9 in Dennis and Barbara Tedlock‘s Teachings from the American earth: Indian religion and philosophy — goes on to say:

The Wintu relationship with nature is one of intimacy and mutual courtesy. He kills a deer only when he needs it for his livelihood, and utilizes every part of it, hoofs and marrow and hide and sinew and flesh. Waste is abhorrent to him, not because he believes in the intrinsic virtue of thrift, but because the deer had died for him.

Now there‘s “a markedly different cultural reality” for you!