West Bank Fainting Epidemic

The West Bank fainting epidemic refers to an outbreak in late March and early April 1983 in which large numbers of Palestinians in the West Bank, the vast majority of them teenage schoolgirls and a smaller number of female Israeli soldiers, complained of fainting and dizziness, symptoms that led to hundreds of hospitalizations. Investigators concluded in April 1983 that the wave of complaints was likely the result of mass psychogenic illness even if some environmental irritant had originally been present, a conclusion supported by a Palestinian health official who estimated that some early cases may have involved inhaling a gas while most were psychosomatic. The fainting spells led to accusations and counter-accusations between Israelis and Palestinians, including some Israeli arrests of Palestinians on suspicion of political agitation; the lead Israeli psychiatric investigator, Albert Hefez, found that both the Israeli press and Palestinian medical personnel had fueled the mass hysteria, and Baruch Modan, director general of Israel's health ministry, likewise concluded in a report for The Lancet that a psychogenic epidemic had affected several hundred individuals, most of them adolescent females, across three West Bank districts over two weeks, tracing the initial cases to the odor of hydrogen sulfide escaping from a faulty latrine.