The mystery of the “poisoning” of hundreds of students in Iran

More than 1,000 Iranian students, mostly schoolgirls, have fallen ill over the past three months in a spate of poisonings, possibly with poisonous gases.

Dozens of girls fell ill in at least 26 schools across the country on Wednesday, markedly increasing the number of cases.

Many patients report similar symptoms: breathing problems, nausea, dizziness and tiredness.

What could be behind these poisonings and how did they spread all over 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, according to local media, at least 58 schools in eight provinces have been affected.

Most cases have involved girls, both in primary and secondary schools, although there are some 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.

A student at a school in Shahryar, near Tehran, said she and her classmates smelled “something very strange”. It was “so disgusting, 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 mom was worried because I was very pale and out of breath,” she explains.

“Fortunately, I recovered quickly,” he said. “Most of the children at our school recovered within 24 hours.”

The student noted that the principal and other school authorities were “afraid”, adding that after reports of cases emerged in other schools, “they came and told us students not to talk about what happened”.

find the cause

Government officials have given conflicting reasons, and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has ordered an investigation to find the “root cause”.

Many in Iran believe that students are 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-aged girls may have been targeted for participating in the recent anti-government protests.

However, the cause of the disease is not yet clear.

Chemical weapons expert Dan Kaszeta, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said that “finding the causative agent [de la enfermedad] it is 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 present, with the right equipment, at the time of exposure,” he tweeted.

Many eyewitness accounts have focused on smells. Describe a tangerine or rotten fish smellbut this could be misleading, Kaszeta said.

“The various odors described in the Iranian incidents are difficult to associate with certain chemical hazards,” he said.

In some videos, you can hear girls complaining about tear gas.which has been widely used during the recent anti-government protests.

Kaszeta said that was “somehow plausible” as poorly made tear gas can release “a lot of junk” with a variety of odors.

The expert stated that biomedical tests, such as blood and urine tests, can help, but are complicated by the number of agents to which they can be attributed.

“The list of things plausibly unpleasant and irritating enough to make people sick contains hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds,” he said.

The incidents in Iran are similar to a series of alleged poisoning cases in Afghan schools in the 2010sKaszeta said.

He said those cases have not been properly investigated and therefore remain largely unsolved.

exhaustive testing

Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Leeds, looked at the results of blood tests on some Iranian schoolgirls and said that no toxins detected. He claimed to have received these results unofficially from sources in Iran.

“It’s hard to rule anything out at this point because 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 a nerve gas or organophosphate poisonsuch as those used in pesticides may be responsible.

“What’s important about these cases is that people generally recovered quite quickly, within 24 hours.” In contrast, in many poisonings, the victims “have been sick for quite some time,” he said.

The professor argued that researchers should take a “very systematic” approach, conducting thorough interviews with all patients and taking blood and urine tests.

A psychological source?

While not ruling out a possible toxic agent, 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 “important epidemiological factors” led him to believe it was not a chain of poisonings, but a a case of “mass sociogenic disease”in which symptoms spread among a group with no apparent biomedical cause.

The spread of cases across the country and the fact that they mostly affected school-aged girls, but not boys or adults, was critical to this conclusion.

He indicated that the nature of the symptoms and the fact that the patients recovered quickly were also important.

In cases of massive sociogenic illness, 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 from most things are pretty similar: your heartbeat starts racing, you feel weak, you turn pale, you feel butterflies in your stomach, you feel unsteady”.

He stated that these symptoms could be due to infection, poisoning or mass fear.

Against a background of harsh government repression of protests, Professor Wessely said that “it is not surprising that this is now happening in Iranian schools”.

He noted that these cases remind him “a lot” of outbreaks of pneumonia 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 a massive sociogenic illness, Wessely explained.

Kaszeta, for his part, added: “We have to accept the obvious possibility that we don’t know what happened or that different things happened and that we’re mixing them up.”

Reporting by Shayan Sardarizadeh, Niko Kelbakiani, William McLennan, Jana Tauschinski, Joshua Cheetham, Kayleen Devlin and Faranak Amidi.