Mystery brain disease patients in New Brunswick say they welcome investigation
ctvnews.ca
ctvnews.ca
MS is more common in northern climates as well, but afaik it's not higher than average in NB.
Source: I have spent quite a bit of time in Moncton.
Can mosquitoes transmit prions?
When was this? Moncton is the biggest and fastest growing city in New Brunswick.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1grpkok/...
> The couple moved to a new town — Canaan Station, N.B. — and Nesbitt made lifestyle and dietary changes. Nesbitt has also started playing video games to improve hand-eye coordination. “There are some things that are still regressing or still degenerating, but many of the symptoms have started to relieve themselves,” she said.
> She still has seizures and tremors, but they’re not as bad or frequent. She’s also able to stand for longer than a “couple of minutes,” and the nerve tingling on one side of her body is not as frequent.
Thank god.
It's notable that the CJDSS director said they ruled out "known forms of prion disease" specifically, and the neuropathologist Jansen stated "no evidence for a prion disease was found" - I think the sentence you're quoting is actually misleading because it seems to suggest that there is negative evidence for a prion disorder, which there is not.
How complex or expensive this could be is not something I have any insight into at all, it could be something that takes millions of dollars and 20 years per test.
symptoms such as "rapidly progressing dementia", unusual weight loss, "tightening of the muscles", uncoordinated gait, and muscle atrophy
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate-induced_delaye...
It seems this isn’t that complex of a case really though? Upon autopsy they just had normal issues.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2019/central-american-k...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/26/7538343...
So it's not entirely _impossible_, but I agree it doesn't seem very likely.
Botulinum toxin has an LD50 of a couple of nanograms per kg of body weight, which makes it especially mad that people use it in a fairly loose fashion for cosmetic skin tightening.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corpora...
I've also heard talk of glyphosate allegedly causing health issues in New Brunswickers, and that Irving uses it as an herbicide for their woodlands across New Brunswick.
Edit: I meant 2020.
Why do the fact than a local government changed from Conservative to Liberal, did have an impact on the story ?
Either a case must be opened or closed, must be decided by doctors & researchers alone, not because of politics.
This is a rural area with a lot of forest. The forestry service uses high concentrations of glyphosate dumped from helicopters to thin the forest.
The forestry service, and its use of glyphosphate is government, and with any government sponsored issue politics will make or break some politician's day.
The fact of the matter is, it doesn't matter that tests sampled at points show glyphosphate levels are well under the point where adverse risks occurred in the labs.
It is possible the chemicals are inducing toxins in microflora that are novel which then cause these issues. Regenesis had such an episodal plotline with fungal spores.
It is also equally possible that the safety testing didn't properly conform to standards, where adverse effects are found at much lower levels than advertised.
The cluster areas according to some news outlets seem correlated to the aerial spraying which is why there's such a push to find out what's going on, while the politicians at higher levels don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
Moncton is not a "rural area with a lot of forest".
If it turns out to be some sort of public health issue such as use of toxins in industry, that's extremely political as well.
The Irving's, if you don't know, are one of the richest families in Canada, and effectively own the province of New Brunswick and run it like their own personal fiefdom. They are also heavily connected to both the Federal and Provincial conservative parties (And the Liberals too honestly), so I would assuage a guess that they had something to do with squashing the former investigation as they knew they were somehow culpable and used their cronies in the government to protect them from any potential liability.
Again, this is all just baseless conjecture, but it feels like at least a potentially reasonable explanation here, as it would be far from the first time billionaires used their wealth and political connections to kill an investigation into their own malfeasance.
What we DO have is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Frenchmen_of_Maine
Interestingly, that article massively downplays how much this affects my family, and how clearly genetic it is. I literally and physically struggle to not do something my girlfriend asks me to do, a la the plot of Bioshock. She will explicitly tell me "WHEN YOU HAVE TIME or WHEN YOU NEXT COME OUT, bring me some water" and I cannot wait to do it. This behavior generalizes across siblings and generations, including to my somewhat deadbeat father who did not raise me, and thus it cannot be a learned response.
This might seem quaint or just "nice", but both sides of my family have extreme ADHD in the form of complete executive dysfunction. I find it nearly impossible to force myself to do things that I WANT to do, but as soon as someone makes a suggestion I have absolutely no blocker to doing that thing (that I have no interest in doing). Unfortunately this effect doesn't counter my executive dysfunction. If I NEED to do something, the suggestion effect doesn't help nearly as much.
I believe this syndrome may be related to some weird form of ADHD that my family carries but that's entirely unfounded speculation based on this observation and how much overlap there is between many of our symptoms and symptoms found in standard Neurodivergences like ADHD and Autism.
The much funnier aspect of this syndrome is that my entire family, without coordination, has taught our significant others to warn us when they do something like pop a champagne cork, or open one of those Pillsbury crescent roll containers, and we have extreme aversions and startle responses when those two specific sound events are concerned. It's funny every time.
We can certainly see the worry, even in all the comments here speculating about various causes.
The key, I think, would be to gather blood, tissue, air, soil, water, and food samples to rule out simpler environmental causes.
This has been going on for a long while, so I associate it with an ongoing coverup of the facts that are too dangerous to disclose.
"All beings in the universe are different. Humans are so dumb that they think heart disease is the leading cause of death, when in fact it's the almond milk... not even the gray's touch the stuff."
- Resident Alien (TV Show), "Homesick".
Jokes meant to impart some brief levity aside, Until there is a serious amount of independent resources put towards a study of this, I don't think anyone is going to find out what's causing this.
There is very little information in the story.
https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/departments/health/neuro-...
Most likely its something novel that's been thawing out from climate change.
That or a unique modified form of an existing chemical, or something else that hasn't been considered. There's some real fringe stuff out there in chemistry that open a whole can of what-ifs, that mainstream science might scoff at and not study seriously.
Something like this might be the cause, albeit very unlikely, still there are things stranger than fiction.
Spitballing here, Water has Memory, where an EM, or NQR signal of extremely dilute substance or dissolved chemical can cause certain unnatural forms of molecules to stabilize in aqueous solutions, or alternatively impart its effects because water mimics the nature of the dissolved substance for a time at higher concentrations than may be detectable.
There were a number of scientists looking into these anomalies, including a Nobel laureate, but they were all largely discredited without rational basis or support by those doing the discrediting.
But the problem is that these observations do not actually support the claims of homeopathy at all- the attempt at connecting the two is entirely nonsense. I like to try to be open minded about fringe science and medical ideas... but homeopathy really takes the cake, and is the type of total nonsense that gives the rest of that type of stuff a bad name.
It is not straightforward to identify a new virus that is not closely related to known human viruses. You cannot just “check for it.” It is largely an unsolved problem, and there are likely a huge number of common viruses that frequently infect humans that still remain undiscovered. When we sequence real world DNA and RNA there is a whole bunch of mysterious stuff that is unexplained, and may include many undiscovered viruses, and bacteria.
I don't agree about the rest of the stuff you mentioned. In fact, there are academics actively studying things like what you mentioned- including Gerald Pollack at UW, but the reality of these phenomenon are more complex than the popular conspiracy theory level explanations imply, and there is no reason to think they lead to things like what you are claiming. Look here: https://www.pollacklab.org/
I used to feel the same about science unfairly rejecting fringe ideas, and that was part of my motivation to become a scientist... but after becoming one I found it is mostly not true. Plenty of scientists openly study and consider stuff like this and are not "discredited" - the reality is a bit more mundane, that the conspiracy theory versions of these stories are just lacking so much nuance that they have little to no relation to the actual research.
You can see from Pollacks' website above that he has a big problem with fraudulent products using his name and likeness to claim some medical benefit, which neither he or his research actually support.
I had read and heard that many places had started using preliminary tools like Lucaprot that scan viral dark matter retrieved using nano-pore sequencers to identify the sequences and common secondary structures of proteins which all viruses need to replicate, to automate detection of new viruses. Is this not widespread?
I'm aware of Pollack's research, but as you said he's suffered reputational harm which started when he began that research. The stories surrounding Luc Montagnier and Benviste, were pretty poorly handled, and they both were somewhat discredited for merely pointing out undiscovered anomalies that merited further investigation.
Nature sent their hatchet man James Randi, who has been known for discrediting people, sometimes without sound basis especially in cases where the underlying mechanism is not understood.
There is something to be said that When you suddenly can't get any funding because you published something which no one else had found in a methodological scientific way, that could be duplicated; that tends to gives teeth to those calling something conspiracy theory, where it seems more like a conspiracy practice.
Every little quirk we find, can potentially be used in an engineered solution to get to some amazing outcome not previously considered. Quantum dot based technologies are an example of this, from what I've read with regards to their history.
That’s why I’m saying we can’t rule out a virus here easily- not until some other cause is proven.
You can also have more complex mechanisms that also involve a virus plus generic or environmental factors- for example the recent finding that implicates HSV in Alzheimers, despite the fact that most people with the virus still never get Alzheimers.
I wonder if it's that, plus the environmental factor. A mutated gene, dominant, always passed on, making the population susceptible.
It is possible to have a trait that occurs with high frequency in a population- so that almost everyone has 2 copies of it.