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A comment on Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cause, study suggests.

Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by aug_aug on Thursday September 19, 2019 @01:51PM (#21018691)
Possibly related tidbit - I used to roll my own cigarettes when working in the field as a geologist, left a pack of papers under the seat of my truck which had no carpeting, spilled 100% DEET on the floor, DEET absorbed into pack of papers. Months later found those same papers (what luck!) and rolled a cigarette without thinking about it, minutes later I was asking my now wife if she "could hear the helicopter sounds!!?" and thought I was losing my mind. I put it all together weeks later when I remembered the DEET spill from several months earlier. Pesticides/insecticides, in my experience at least, can induce those symptoms, lol - maybe the mosquito spraying was a little heavy by the hotel? And now I hope I don't have brain damage, thanks internet.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by dboreham on Thursday September 19, 2019 @03:42PM (#21019893)
I had an experience when I was a hardware engineer working in a lab that had been converted from previously being a machine room (for mainframes: raised floors, closed ventilation system). I was cleaning a prototype board with trichlorotrifluoroethane (or something similar -- whatever the solvent du jour was back then). The board had the typical green FR4 or Brobimer solder mask film. While engaged in this task I saw a little green dragon emerge from the board, chuckle, then blow a small flame from its snout. The whole thing was entirely realistic. The only thing that made me realize it wasn't real is I was pretty sure dragons don't exist.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by klyrs on Thursday September 19, 2019 @08:41PM (#21022217)
So that's why circuits are full of magic smoke! Now I'm gonna feel bad about destroying dragon habitats in addition to the embarrassment over frying components D:
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by skim_milk on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:41PM (#21019213)
When my father was a child, he would bike behind the trucks that sprayed DDT all over the neighborhood because the DDT mist kept him cool. I hope you'll be fine, because people have done much worse!
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by t1lthesky on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:43PM (#21020555)
Ha I remember doing the same thing when I was ~6 years old in South Korea. There would be these trucks that went around spraying mosquito killing fog in the apartment complexes and all the little kids from the neighborhood would run behind them.

Well now I'm 30 and so far things seem to be ok! Fingers crossed

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by therein on Thursday September 19, 2019 @07:41PM (#21021848)
Yup, this has been my experience growing up outside of the US.

Watching this video made me facepalm really hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2NmuQW8cjE

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by emerongi on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:57AM (#21024572)
The description on that video is hilarious.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by o-__-o on Friday September 20, 2019 @08:09AM (#21025728)
Meanwhile I’m out walking my dog and one of these trucks turns the corner. I immediately turn and run, it’s always futile.. the truck passes me and I’m left standing there holding my shirt over my face. Doesn’t matter; inhaled DEET.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by Jenda_ on Friday September 20, 2019 @09:13PM (#21032830)
FYI DDT and DEET are completely different chemicals, one is an insecticide, the other is a repellent. Some people in this thread seem to confuse them. I don't think they would spray DEET at scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEET

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by King-Aaron on Thursday September 19, 2019 @11:30PM (#21023115)
My grandmother talked about playing in piles of fresh asbestos when she was a child, because it was soft and fun to jump in.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by christophilus on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:55PM (#21020671)
Yep. We did this in the deep south when I was growing up. Good times.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by gbmor on Thursday September 19, 2019 @06:03PM (#21021173)
Same here, in rural south Louisiana in the 90s. Whelp, uh, I think I'm fine ...
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by WalterBright on Thursday September 19, 2019 @06:18PM (#21021314)
I drank lots of Coca-cola for decades, thinking it's only sugar, what could go wrong?
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by harry8 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @10:21PM (#21022752)
Please, what is your additional concern here?
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by rlonn on Saturday September 21, 2019 @04:46AM (#21034225)
What is yours?
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by GhettoMaestro on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:13PM (#21020249)
Omg I hope your dad is alright?
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by joecool1029 on Friday September 20, 2019 @02:03AM (#21023686)
As scary sounding as the anecdote was, DDT is known for relatively low human (and mammal) toxicity. They did absolutely insane human studies with it in the 1950's, and dosages of up to 380mg/kg were tolerable. There was also no evidence that it produced cancer at commonly exposed dosages: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicro... < some more info here.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by geomark on Thursday September 19, 2019 @07:53PM (#21021939)
DEET is an ingredient in a cocktail that has been popular with the brainless backpackers that crowd some of the islands in Thailand. They mix it with cough syrup, kratom and coke. If you get too much of it then you apparently you die [1].

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-sisters-died-...

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by rolph on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:36PM (#21019156)
A couple of crumbs to follow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEET

https://www.beyondpesticides.org/programs/mosquitos-and-inse...

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by jlpom on Friday September 20, 2019 @01:06AM (#21023472)
If you have ways to eliminate it with time, the DEET is probably long gone from you're organism and that's what matter if you're fine.

On sligthly unrelated and personal note, I made the mistake to pass an MRI with gadolinium based contrast (refuse it if you have choice!) months ago and the lasting effects are still a huge toll on my health (difficulties to think, talk and sleep, skin and paint raidiness, cardiac and sexual (erectile and nearly no spermatogenese, maybe linked to thyroïd?) issues. I hope this isn't permanent but there is no improvement in sigth, and no explaination for why it wasn't filtered (creatinine level from a blood test months after the incident was on the lower end but still in the normals brackets) that could accord me support from a nephrologist or other specialist to get rid of the deposits.

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by jMyles on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:32PM (#21019103)
That's an interesting story. How long did the effect last? Did you ever report it to anyone in any "official" capacity? (ie, seek medical attention, report it to the manufacturer, etc)
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by seamyb88 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @09:01PM (#21022337)
This sounds like a politician's cannabis story.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by aug_aug on Friday September 20, 2019 @10:59AM (#21027413)
Hah, I could regale you with cannabis stories all day too, during this incident though, tobacco only. Everyone says "suuuuuree" it was tobacco about 3 min. in every time I tell the story.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by onetimemanytime on Friday September 20, 2019 @03:49AM (#21024159)
same thing happened to one with roundup, cigs got wet and I guess burned roundup and lungs don't go together. Coma and all
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by Donald on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:38PM (#21019180)
DEET is a good acetylcholinesterase inhibitor - certainly possible it has mild hallucinogenic effects.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by refurb on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:26PM (#21020370)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEET

DEET isn’t a cholinesterase inhibitor.

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by selectodude on Thursday September 19, 2019 @05:04PM (#21020751)
Yes, but it’s commonly combined with carbamate which is.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by refurb on Thursday September 19, 2019 @05:19PM (#21020861)
Carbamate is an insecticide. In what insect repellent products is it combined with DEET?

And in terms of cholinesterase inhibition, there was a 2009 paper that said it was. Digging into it, it was when applied in vitro at a concentration of 20uM, which you’d need to drink hundreds of milliliters to achieve.

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by CamperBob2 on Friday September 20, 2019 @01:38AM (#21023581)
Digging into it, it was when applied in vitro at a concentration of 20uM, which you’d need to drink hundreds of milliliters to achieve.

Which apparently is a thing that is done, going by the bizarre link in geomark's post above.

People are weird.

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by TrinaryWorksToo on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:32PM (#21019104)
DEET is not a pesticide. Are you thinking of DDT?
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by altec3 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:38PM (#21019177)
This article does say it has insecticidal properties - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4125160/
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by dTal on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:05PM (#21036886)
Yeah, it's pretty toxic stuff. However, it's not typically used as an insecticide.

Other things with insecticidal properties: gasoline, bleach, car windshields, and bricks.

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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by tyingq on Thursday September 19, 2019 @02:44PM (#21019253)
It's the insect repellent in, for example, "Off" spray.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by sp332 on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:33PM (#21020449)
A repellent is not necessarily the same as an insecticide.
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Re:Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cau... by tyingq on Thursday September 19, 2019 @05:45PM (#21021040)
Yup, that's what I was trying to clear up.
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