Canada - New Brunswick monitoring more than 48 cases (10 fatal) of unknown neurological disease - 2015+ - officials say illnesses are due to unrelated

[alert]

Glyphosate is used worldwide without producing this particular syndrome, so is unlikely to be the cause.

There's a lot more about Ms. Cormier in that article, including a current picture of her sitting in a wheelchair outdoors without any tubes or machines visible, so she's at least no worse than we last left her. The story about her and the ice skating rink is also new information; could she have taken a fall on her head as a skater at some point?

 

[Pathfinder]

PHAC to deploy to New Brunswick over reports of mystery brain symptoms

Province says 2 federal epidemiologists will help neurologist file required paperwork

Kate McKenna · CBC News · Posted: Aug 10, 2023 3:00 AM CDT | Last Updated: August 10
...
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) is deploying two epidemiologists to New Brunswick in September to support the province's public health team, at the request of New Brunswick's public health authority.

The move follows a letter from a high-profile neurologist warning that a growing number of abnormally young patients are facing a rapid onset of neurological symptoms.
...
In a statement, PHAC confirmed its epidemiologists will work under the supervision of New Brunswick public health and conduct a "three-day scoping exercise that will include an on-site review of patient records that have been collected to date."
...
Marrero has become a fierce advocate for patients.

In his January 2023 letter, he wrote to Canada's top public health official and to Russell warning them the number of cases has grown from 48 to more than 147, claiming that some are as young as 17 years old.

He wrote that some patients are experiencing "very advance evidence of neurodegenerative diseases," including dementia, severe pain syndrome, brain and muscle atrophy and more.

"Some of these patients are, unfortunately, in advanced stages of clinical deterioration and near the end of life," he wrote.

He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/phac-new-brunswick-brain-illness-1.6929060

 

[Pathfinder]

​Second Canadian scientist alleges brain illness investigation was shut down

Leyland Cecco and Campbell MacDiarmid
Fri 21 Jun 2024 13.16 EDT
...
In a leaked email seen by the Guardian, Prof Samuel Weiss, a neuroscientist working for the Canadian federal agency responsible for funding medical research, wrote that the government had deliberately curtailed the search for an explanation.

“In the spring of 2021, I felt incredibly optimistic that an all of government effort to unravel the mystery was in the cards. However, in short order, the scientific effort was shut down at the request of the [federal and provincial] Governments,” Weiss wrote in the email sent in May.

“I don’t think it is helpful to suggest or point to who or why – suffice to say that we were prepared to marshal both financial and human scientific resources to tackle the mystery, but they were declined.”

It is not clear to whom the email was sent. It concluded with Weiss offering a heartfelt apology. “All I can offer is my sincere apologies for our poor response to the mystery illness – and my hope that you don’t suffer too much. You and the 350 others affected deserve so much more.”
...
This month, the Guardian reported that another leading federal scientist, Michael Coulthart, had alleged he had been barred from investigating the cluster of unexplained illnesses.

Coulthart, a microbiologist who heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, wrote in a leaked email that he believed an “environmental exposure – or a combination of exposures – is triggering and/or accelerating a variety of neurodegenerative syndromes”, with people seemingly susceptible to different protein misfolding ailments including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/a...ges-brain-illness-investigation-was-shut-down

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See also:

Potential Neurological Syndrome

Investigation of a Cluster of a Potential Neurological Syndrome of Unknown Cause in New Brunswick
​
https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/health/neuro-cluster.html

 

[Shiloh]

Source: https://dnyuz.com/2024/08/14/they-all-got-mysterious-brain-diseases-theyre-fighting-to-learn-why/

They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why.
August 14, 2024

In late 2018, after an otherwise-normal Christmas holiday, Laurie Beatty started acting strange. An 81-year-old retired contractor, he grew unnaturally quiet and began poring over old accounting logs from a construction business he sold decades earlier, convinced that he had been bilked in the deal.

Over the course of several days, Beatty slipped further into unreality. He told his wife the year was 1992 and wondered aloud why his hair had turned white. Then he started having seizures. His arms began to move in uncontrollable jerks and twitches. By the end of May, he was dead.

Doctors at the Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Center in Moncton, the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, zeroed in on an exceedingly rare condition — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by prions, misfolding proteins in the brain — as the most likely culprit. The doctors explained this to Beatty’s children, Tim and Jill, and said they would run additional tests to confirm the post-mortem diagnosis. Three months later, when the siblings returned to the office of their father’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, that’s what they were expecting to hear. Instead, Marrero told them that Laurie’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob test had come back negative. “We were all looking at one another,” Tim says, “because we were all very confused.” If Creutzfeldt-Jakob hadn’t killed their father, then what had? What Marrero said next was even more unsettling.

“There’s something going on,” they recall him saying. “And I don’t know what it is.”​...

 

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-...ournal-american-medical-association-1.7527682

New Brunswick has no mystery neurological disease, scientific study concludes
Report published in U.S. medical journal reassessed 25 of 222 patients diagnosed with unknown syndrome
Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon · CBC News · Posted: May 07, 2025 11:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: May 7​

A new scientific study has found no evidence of a mystery brain disease in New Brunswick, says a report published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, known as JAMA.

Instead, an independent reassessment of 25 of 222 patients diagnosed by Moncton neurologist Alier Marrero as having a "neurological syndrome of unknown cause" concluded that all of the cases were attributable to well-known conditions.

These include common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, functional neurological disorder, traumatic brain injury, and metastatic cancer, says the report.

Despite the small sample size, "when we did the statistics … the chances of any of those other individuals having a mystery disease was less than one in a million," said Dr. Anthony Lang, a senior neurologist and neuroscientist in Toronto, and one of the 13 co-authors.

"So the numbers are pretty staggering and, I think very, very convincing."

The researchers, affiliated with the University of Toronto, New Brunswick's Horizon Health Network and other Canadian institutions, do not believe exposure to something in the environment, such as the herbicide glyphosate or heavy metals, made the patients ill either, said Lang, director of the Edmund J Safra Program in Parkinson's Disease at the University Health Network.​..