The Taliban have been poisoning scores of Afghan schoolgirls for attending school, right? Wrong – at least that’s the position of the World Health Organisation. According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, schoolgirls and teachers complaining of nausea and other symptoms have reported poisoned water supplies at at least 12 girls’ schools across Afghanistan since 2009. But there have been no fatalities, and despite extensive efforts by the UN’s World Health Organisation to get to the bottom of the matter no one has found proof of poison or any other organic cause. Now, investigators at the World Health Organisation (WHO) report that the most likely answer to the mystery is that the reports of poisoning are a form of mass hysteria.
The girls and teachers suffering from symptoms really believe they’re sick, and in a way, they really are. Nausea is nausea, fainting is fainting. And though it seems odd, there have been similar cases around the world down the centuries. Some historians believe the precipitating events that led to the Salem, Mass. Witch Trials of 1692-93, which led to the murder of about two dozen accused “witches,” was mass hysteria among a group of girls.
In a little noticed article in the WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Monitor from May titled “Mass Psychogenic Illness in Afghanistan” the organisation reports on the latest allegation of poisoning in Taluqan district, Takhar Province”: “A total of 103 … school girls from Bibi Hajerah High School were admitted with symptoms of weakness, nausea, dizziness, and syncope. Some reported smelling a stench…. Clinical assessment by the attending physicians and similar past history rule out an organic cause. The cases were considered as a mass psychogenic illness, given treatment and discharged home.”
The WHO goes on: “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…. However, investigations into the causes of these outbreaks have yielded no such evidence so far. In the last four years over 1,634 cases from 22 schools have been treated for Mass Psychogenic Illness in Afghanistan. There are no related deaths reported.” 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.
A history of mass hysteria 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.
