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It’s happening again.

On April 21, the authorities in Takhar Province in northeastern Afghanistan announced that up to 74 girls at Bibi Maryam school had fallen ill and were suspected of having been poisoned by gas. On April18, more than a dozen girls were hospitalized at a nearby school with similar symptoms. The governor’s spokesman, Sulaiman Moradi, was quoted as blaming the “enemies of the government and the country” for poisoning the girls.

But I’m willing to bet that there was no poison.

Over the past few years, thousands of girls have fallen victim to waves of alleged poisonings in Afghan schools. The government, media and education activists have blamed the Taliban, and the police in a number of provinces have produced the “guilty” parties, with some of them confessing on national television.

But last July when I investigated the subject for Newsweek, I discovered never-released reports showing that the United Nations, the World Health Organization and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force had investigated the incidents for years and had never found, despite extensive laboratory tests, any evidence of toxins or poisoning — a fact that may explain ISAF’s conspicuous silence on the issue.

The girls’ symptoms provide a clue to the real cause, however. Despite the high number of victims, their symptoms are mild — dizziness, nausea and fainting, as opposed to the internal bleeding and convulsions doctors would expect from most toxins — and there are no recorded deaths associated with the incidents. The overwhelming majority of the girls were discharged from the hospital within a few hours.

These facts, along with case histories, have convinced experts at the World Health Organization that the “poisonings” are likely a form of mass hysteria known as “mass psychogenic illness.” Indeed, according to Dr. Sayed Abed, an internal-medicine specialist at Takhar’s provincial hospital, the recently affected girls show the same minor symptoms as they did last year.

“There is a zero-percent chance they were poisoned,” he said told me. “It’s a psychological cause.”

The phenomenon of groups of people falling ill for psychological, rather than physical, reasons is not unknown, nor is it limited to Afghanistan. Moreover, the typical victims are school-age girls. In late 2011, when a group of girls in Le Roy, New York , fell victim to a mysterious twitching illness, medical authorities eventually concluded it was psychogenic.

School-age girls in Afghanistan are among the country’s most vulnerable groups. Already suffering from insecurity, malnutrition and poverty, they are also subject to the pressures of puberty and the country’s severe gender inequality. In the climate of fear created by media reports of Taliban “poisonings,” many girls are no doubt highly susceptible. In past cases, a trigger — a farmer spraying pesticides next door, a propane leak, a new girl having an epileptic seizure — has caused widespread panic and the onset of the familiar symptoms.

This does not mean the girls are faking it. Their illness is real, just as real as a person’s clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. And they need help, in the form of counseling and education, as well as long-term interventions to improve school conditions and access to mental health resources.

But as long as the government and media remain in denial about the real cause of the incidents, the victims won’t receive that counseling. Those who fulminate against the Taliban, and who mindlessly publicize each “poisoning,” only contribute to the generalized anxiety that helps precipitate these incidents and bring harm to their victims.

Meanwhile, there is a darker side to this story. Who are the “perpetrators” of these nonexistent crimes being paraded on TV? Last year in Takhar, I found that the Afghan intelligence service had arrested two 17-year-old girls named Seema Gul and Shukira. A female interrogator beat them into confessing to poisoning their schoolmates, and one of the girl’s videotaped confession was distributed and broadcast on a number of local stations. After I published my story, and ISAF and the U.N. put pressure on the government, the girls were released, but none of the provincial officials involved in the incident were held accountable for their actions.

In past years, new waves of “poisonings” have coincided with the onset of warm weather, and these latest incidents are likely the first of a new crop this summer. There are encouraging signs that Afghans are beginning to be aware of their true nature: Most news organizations have treated the incidents with caution, and Gen. Khair Mohammad Temor, police chief of Takhar Province, also debunked them, in apparent contradiction to the province’s governor.

“The only reason is rumors,” he said. “We haven’t seen any symptoms of poisoning.”

But if the incidents continue, other provincial officials may be less scrupulous as they come under pressure to make them stop. A strong stand is needed.