Hundreds of students have fallen ill with similar symptoms - but what is making them sick?
By Reality Check, BBC Monitoring and BBC PersianMore than a 1,000 Iranian students - mostly schoolgirls - have fallen ill over the past three months in what has been reported to be a wave of poisonings, possibly with toxic gas. What is making people sick?
Many of these show young people in distress in school settings, with some being loaded into ambulances and others lying in hospital beds. Others show ambulances arriving and crowds gathered outside school gates. Many in Iran believe students are being deliberately poisoned in an attempt to close girls' schools, which have been one of centres of anti-government protests since September.Some pupils and parents suggested that schoolgirls may have been targeted for taking part in recent anti-government protests.
In some videos, girls can be heard complaining about tear gas, which has been widely used during recent anti-government protests. Mr Kaszeta said that was "plausible in some way", as poorly-made tear gas can release off "a lot of junk" with a range of odours. "It's difficult to rule anything in or out at this point as that would require a full screening for a whole variety of things," said Prof Hay, who has investigated suspected chemical attacks across the world.
Prof Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King's College London, said several "key epidemiological factors" led him to believe these were not a chain of poisonings, but were instead a case of "mass sociogenic illness" - in which symptoms spread among a group with no obvious biomedical cause.
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