By JOSH LEDERMAN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department said Wednesday that the United States has evacuated several more of its workers out of China after medical testing revealed they might have been affected by unexplained health incidents that have hurt U.S. personnel in Cuba and China.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said "a number of individuals" have been brought to the U.S. They are in addition to a U.S. worker in China who had been evacuated previously, as the Trump administration had already disclosed.
The new evacuations come after the U.S. sent a medical team to the Chinese city of Guangzhou to conduct screenings of American government workers. The team arrived earlier this week.
Nauert said the "medical screenings are ongoing." She said they are being offered to "any personnel who have noted concerning symptoms or wanted baseline screening."
A U.S. official said the evacuated Americans are being brought for testing to the University of Pennsylvania. That's where doctors have been treating and studying patients evacuated from the U.S. Embassy in Havana.
The official wasn't authorized to discuss the situation publicly and requested anonymity.
The China incidents have raised fears that unexplained incidents that started in Cuba in 2016 have spread to China. The U.S. government has deemed those incidents "specific attacks" on American workers but hasn't publicly identified a cause or culprit. Most of the incidents were accompanied by bizarre, unexplained sounds that initially led U.S. investigators to suspect a sonic attack.
The American government worker who was removed from China earlier reported "subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure." China said last month that it had found no explanation.
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