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image source, Getty Images
More and more cases are reported.
More than 1,000 Iranian students, mostly schoolgirls, have fallen ill in the past three months in what has been reported as a wave of poisonings, possibly with toxic gases.
In at least 26 schools across the country, dozens of girls fell ill on Wednesday, clearly escalating the number of cases.
Many patients report similar symptoms: breathing problems, nausea, dizziness and fatigue.
What could be behind these poisonings and how have they spread throughout the country?
the first case
The first known case was reported at a school in the city of Qom, where 18 students fell ill and were taken to hospital on November 30 last year.
Since then, at least 58 schools in eight provinces have been affected, according to local media.
Most of the cases have involved girls, both in primary and secondary schools, although there have been a few reports of affected boys and teachers.
The BBC analyzed dozens of videos posted on social media and verified many of the schools filmed.
Numerous videos show distraught young women in school settings, some in ambulances and others lying in hospital beds.
Others show the arrival of ambulances and crowds gathered in front of the school gates.
image source, Twitter
Students with symptoms share images after doctors took blood samples from them.
A student at a school in Shahryar, near Tehran, said she and her classmates smelled “something very strange.” It was “so nasty, like rotten fruit, but much spicier”he told the BBC.
The next day, “many of the students got sick and didn’t come to school, our English literature teacher got sick too,” she said.
“When I got home, I felt dizzy and sick, my mother was worried because I was very pale and out of breath,” she explained.
“Fortunately I recovered soon,” he said. “Most of the children in our school recovered within 24 hours.”
The student noted that the principal and other school authorities were “scared,” adding that after reports of cases emerged at other schools, “they came and told us students not to talk about what had happened”.
find the cause
Government officials have given conflicting reasons, and Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has ordered an investigation to find the “root cause.”
Many in Iran believe that students are being deliberately poisoned in an attempt to close girls’ schoolswhich have been one of the centers of anti-government protests since September.
In Iran, almost all schools are single-sex.
Some students and parents suggested that the school-age girls may have been targeted for participating in the recent anti-government protests.
image source, Twitter
Emergency services attend cases of poisoning at a primary school in eastern Tehran.
However, the cause of the disease is not yet clear.
Chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said “finding the causative substance [de la enfermedad] It’s usually the only useful evidence, but it can be extremely difficult.”
Because substances can dissipate or break down, collecting a sample “requires you to be there, with the proper equipment, at the time of exposure,” he tweeted.
Many eyewitness accounts have focused on odors. Describe a smell of tangerine or rotten fishbut this can be misleading, Kaszeta said.
“The various odors described in the Iranian incidents are difficult to link to particular chemical hazards,” he said.
In some videos, girls can be heard complaining about tear gas.which has been widely used during the recent anti-government protests.
image source, IRNA
Parents of the poisoned girls protested outside the Qom governor’s office in November.
Kaszeta said that was “somewhat plausible” since poorly made tear gas can release “a lot of crap” with a variety of odors.
The expert stated that biomedical tests, such as blood and urine tests, could provide an answer, but were complicated by the number of agents to which they can be attributed.
“The list of things that are plausibly unpleasant and irritating enough to make people sick includes hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds,” he said.
The incidents in Iran bear similarities to a series of alleged cases of poisoning in Afghan schools in the 2010saccording to Kaszeta.
He said those cases were not properly investigated and therefore remain largely unresolved.
exhaustive tests
Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, reviewed the results of blood tests on some of the Iranian schoolgirls, and said that no toxins detected. He claimed that he received these results unofficially from sources in Iran.
“It’s hard to rule anything out at this point, as that would require a full assessment of a wide variety of things,” said Hay, who has investigated suspected chemical attacks around the world.
However, he stated that from what he has seen it is unlikely that a nerve agent or organophosphate poisonsuch as those used in pesticides, could be responsible.
“What is significant about these cases is that people generally recovered quite quickly, within 24 hours.” By contrast, in many poisonings the victims are “sick for quite a while,” she said.
The professor argued that researchers should take a “very systematic” approach, conducting thorough interviews with all patients, as well as doing blood and urine tests.
A psychological source?
While not ruling out a possible toxic substance, both Professor Hay and Kaszeta suggested that psychological factors could play a role.
Professor Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King’s College London, said several “key epidemiological factors” led him to believe it was not a chain of poisonings, but a a case of “mass sociogenic illness”in which symptoms spread among a group without obvious biomedical cause.
The spread of cases across the country and the fact that they predominantly affected school-age girls, but not boys or adults, were critical to this conclusion.
He stated that the nature of the symptoms and the fact that the patients recovered quickly were also key.
image source, IRNA
Mothers protest the poisoning of students at a school in Iran.
In cases of mass sociogenic disease, which used to be described as “mass hysteria”the symptoms experienced are real, but they are caused by anxiety, not toxic intoxication, Wessely said.
“The early stages of poisoning by most things are pretty similar: your pulse begins to race, you feel weak, you turn pale, you feel butterflies in your stomach, you feel shaky“.
He stated that these symptoms could be due to infection, poisoning, or mass anxiety.
Against a backdrop of harsh government crackdown on protests, Professor Wessely said, “It’s not surprising that this is now happening in Iranian schools.”
He pointed out that these cases remind him “a lot” of the outbreaks of undiagnosed diseases in Kosovo in 1990 and the occupied West Bank in 1986.
No biomedical cause was found in either, and experts believe they were the result of mass sociogenic disease, Wessely explained.
Kaszeta, for his part, added: “We have to accept the distinct possibility that we don’t know what happened or that several different things actually happened and we are confusing them.”
Reportería de Shayan Sardarizadeh, Niko Kelbakiani, William McLennan, Jana Tauschinski, Joshua Cheetham, Kayleen Devlin and Faranak Amidi.
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