Hey, it's Michael Lohanger, and you're listening to the On the Media Podcast Extra.

Last April, I took a look at an affliction affecting American diplomats in Havana, Cuba and beyond.

A new assessment by U.S. intelligence official says the debilitating ailment known as

Havana Syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

To make the assessment from that it's likely not a foreign adversary, I think it's very bad

intelligence tradecraft.

There's nothing in this latest report

that disproves the possibility that this is

from a foreign adversary, which is what we should worry about.

So my suggestion here.

Today, there's still a heated debate

about the cause of Havana Syndrome.

Some patients, journalists, intelligence workers,

and medical experts say that it was an attack from an unidentified weapon, maybe from Russia.

Others argue that the culprit is more likely the human mind. what's known as mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria.

That's where I landed when I looked into it last April.

You can find a link by the way to that piece in the description for this episode.

I had so many more questions about mass psychogenic illness that we didn't have a chance to

answer in that up Dan to talk about the podcast which focuses on a curious story in Leroy

New York in 2011 when a group of high school students started exhibiting the same

Tourette's like symptoms.

This is my eighth or ninth day,

...