Under hela augusti har jag i
praktiken varit heltidssysselsatt med den fråga som jag ägnat mer än 15 år av
mitt liv: Förgiftningen i Kosova 1990. Gå
gärna till hemsidan www.denmystiskasjukdomen.se Där finns utförlig information om vad det
handlar om!
Förra hösten tyckte jag att det såg ut som om
jag äntligen skulle kunna avsluta detta engagemang: Jag lyckades få chefredaktören för European Journal of Epidemiology (EJE) att gå med på att införa ett
genmäle gentemot en artikel, skriven av Zoran Radovanovic 1996. Där lyckades
författaren få ”den lärda världen” att tro att Kosova 1990 hade drabbats av en
gigantisk masshysteri.
Tyvärr blev inte genmälet
klart förrän i maj i år. Det berodde på att de albanska läkare som skulle
utforma texten hade problem med att organisera sig. Men den för mig stora
besvikelsen var att redaktören på EJE sade nej till genmälet. Det var något förbryllande, eftersom han i höstas av
mig hade fått en kritisk granskning av Radovanovic’s artikel, och den måste ha
varit hans underlag för beslutet att acceptera ett genmäle.
Jag vet fortfarande inte
varför han nu sagt NEJ. Jag har skrivit och frågat men inte fått svar.
Läs genmälet här:
If Kosova had a case of mass hysteria in
1990, it stands out in two ways: its length
and the many patients. Francois Sirois has studied 70 mass
hysterias and his conclusion is that the normal length is 3-14 days. Almost 50
% had at most 30 individuals. Compare this with Kosova: Length 8 months and
8000 individuals.
Using
behavioural science Radovanovic refers to studies with very small populations
(a factory and a school) and applies them on the 2 millions inhabitants in
Kosova. Is it possible?
Radovanovic only used Serb sources. (He admits
they were in a bad condition.) As
a consequence he
is ignorant. The letter
he mentions (p. 107), written “five months after the epidemic”, is dated
August 15. It means he believes the “epidemic” ended in March. Actually, it
continued the whole year. It also means he wrongly believes there were “only”
around 4000 patients. Actually, the patients counted about 8000.
He also states no “poison spreader” was
ever discovered, which, according to him, must occur, if poison caused the
epidemic. In fact, perpetrators were unveiled!
Another consequence is his wrong conclusions. He found no Serb
patients in his Serb sources, and by using argumentum
e silentio his conclusion is: All patients were Albanians. With
Albanian sources, he had found even a Serb policeman among the patients.
Radovanovic’s description of the
symptoms is unsatisfying. Albanian statistics shows that many symptoms could
hardly be caused by hysteria:
Almost 100 % of the patients had conjunctivitis;
86 % redness in the face. (Radovanovic
means Albanian doctors’ maltreatment caused the redness. But the patients had
it before entering hospitals).
79 % ogulargyric crisis;
51 % redness of mucosis;
Witnesses describe cases of extreme
cramps. A leg could be fixed in an unnatural position, impossible to adjust.
Witnesses also let us understand that hypersalivation
was more common than according to statistics;
Mass hysteria
experts as Bartholomew and Wessely mention a list of characteristica
for mass hysteria. Radovanovic says all were found in Kosova. Three are rapid spread and rapid recovery from modest symptoms.
Interviewed
patients give another picture. Most of them had problems several weeks, many for
months and some for years. There are even patients saying they still have
symptoms. One, a high school student, was poisoned by a thick gas, which made
students faint or vomit. Since then his eyes are inflamed and he has in vane travelled
through Europe for help.
Another example, a girl, age 17: She felt a smell like perfume, fainted and woke up -
in a hospital. "All my body was
shaking, blood was flowing from the nose, tears from my burning eyes".
Modest symptoms?
Radovanovic means Kosova was “with few exceptions”
hit by a teenage epidemic, and this
is another mass hysteria criterion. But the exceptions are many. There were
patients from 3 years old to 66. 380 were factory workers.
In an important symposium in Zagreb 1990 a Serb
professor, Lubomir Eric, who had believed
in the teenage thesis, got chocked when he heard also small children were
victims. One of them was a Serb boy, 3 years old.
Radovanovic also maintains that no poison
was found in Kosova. He refers to the Military
Medical Hospital
in Belgrade,
which took 153 blood samples and three days later published the result: No
poison. The quick answer caused a commentary from Dr Barend Cohen. He found it strange that this hospital in three
days could do what a Western laboratory needed six weeks to perform.
Radovanovic doesn’t mention Bernard Benedetti, who took 150 samples, finding poison. But,
according to him, a French minister stopped
the publication of his report. Also Franjo
Pllavsic, a Croatian biochemist, found poison (organophosphate) in urine
samples. His research was presented in the Zagreb symposium.
Furthermore, Radovanovic refers to the
British doctors Alastair Hay and John Foran, who 1991 in the Lancet wrote
they found no poison in Kosova. But the Lancet notice gives no information about
how Foran (he took the samples)
worked, and nothing about where
in Kosova samples were taken, or how
the patients were selected. And nothing about his contacts
with officials in Kosova or the time span between the patients’ first
symptoms and the taking of samples.
These questions are surely answered in
their report,
which should be sent to the “Albanian Community” by a French organisation. But no
report arrived, and Dr Hay can’t find his copy. Unfortunately, Dr Foran has been impossible to locate.
Radovanovic gives a detailed description
of how the epidemic started in a school in Podujeva. The origin was an
infection in one single class, observed March 14. When students from other
classes got sick and fainted March
19, mass hysteria
had broken out.
But this description is a construction. On
March 12, a school porter from Podujeva got a hospital bed in a clinic, which
he had visited some days earlier. He had symptoms, which students got one week
later: red cheeks, fainting, headache. Was he hit by teenage hysteria, before
it started?
To know what happened in Kosova 1990 it’s
necessary to ask the patients. Radovanovic has not done it; maybe he hasn’t
even got second hand information.
Independent of one another, witnesses have
given versions, all fairly similar.
Here a Podujeva witness:
Entering her
class-room she observed “something white", placed on her desk. She got curious,
poked in it and smelled. A class friend did the same but got symptoms: Foam came from her mouth and she couldn't answer when spoken to.
The witness
then saw pupils fainting. She
ran to the school yard. There pupils were lying, fainted or with cramps. She couldn’t avoid treading on them, as
they were so many.
Then she got
symptoms herself, tremors for 10-15 minutes in intervals. This went on for
three months.
School witnesses often
mention foaming
and fainting
after poking in
a “white substance”.
Foaming was frequent also among factory
workers.
Radovanovic
says nothing about this. Shall we believe in him – or the witnesses?