A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease
bbc.com
bbc.com
I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this:
New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded company), in charge of the main industries of the province. They owned every newspaper in the province, and are known to be adversarial to any community paper, starting new papers just to drive out of business the small upstarts they don't own -- I've seen it play out in my community. People are literally afraid to criticize this family publicly, because they fund SO MUCH of the nonprofit sector. If you are trying to get a project off the ground, you can't look sideways at them or your project will be buried. And their papers certainly won't speak kindly of your criticism.
And most glaringly, one of their ex-Vice Presidents was premier of the province during this time.
So there is an extra level of concern that some locals have about the optics of the province shutting down the research.
The Irving family is highly manipulative of political affairs, and imho have held the province back for decades (e.g. influencing what schools get funded/built, to create the working stock that support their businesses, etc)
Strikingly similar to the reaction around cancer clusters, including the witch doctors who still think “mass hysteria” is a thing.
It’s not always environmental, but it’s usually environmental and weird to not start with that assumption.
They are also strangely generous. They fund a lot of good, as they know how to conceive of "good". They are more like mostly-benevolent-but-controlling royalty of sorts. Including the "everyone has an opinion" part of royalty. Whether they are good or bad for the region, there are polarizing views.
I understand the general vibe as a learned helplessness of sorts.
The Irvings basically own NB like its their own private fiefdom, and if anyone's doing any major polluting in the province its almost certainly them.
They own politicians, they own institutions, and they have an inordinate amount of influence on provincial politics and policy, so personally I have a pretty strong suspicion they are likely responsible for this outbreak, they know they are responsible, and in order to avoid consequence, they are using their wealth and political power to shut down any further investigation into this outbreak.
Its a story as old as time honestly... Some rich bastards do some shady shit in the pursuit of even more money and power, us regular folks suffer, the rich bastards use their wealth and political power to cover it up, and around the world spins until the next act of billionaire malfeasance and none of the rich bastards are ever held accountable.
Seriously, Occam's razor to me at least makes what's going on here pretty damn self evident. What's more likely, that hundreds of people are making up a mystery illness, or that this is just yet another of the innumerable instances of billionaires polluting the earth in the pursuit of profit and making people sick in the process?
I certainly know which scenario I consider most likely.
The only common factor between these patients is Dr. Marrero. It is notable that he is not the only physician who works in that clinic, but is the only one diagnosing this condition. The most likely cause is weak diagnostic skills for challenging patients.
Unfortunately, a majority of these patients likely have Functional Neurologic Disorder https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conversion-di... , which is a horrible condition that accounts for a plurality of cases seen by most neurologists. This phantom diagnosis will probably make recovery almost impossible for those people. Acceptance of that diagnosis is the number 1 positive indicator for recovery.
Source: I live in the canadian maritimes, and know many neurologists.
> In an October 2023 email exchange with another PHAC member, Coulthart, who served as the federal lead in the 2021 investigation into the New Brunswick illness, said he had been “essentially cut off” from any involvement in the issue, adding he believed the reason was political.
> Coulthart, a veteran scientist who currently heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment by the Guardian. But in the leaked email, he wrote that he believes 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 disease and Parkinson’s disease.
> Coulthart argues this phenomenon does not easily fit within “shallow paradigms” of diagnostic pathology and the complexity of the issue has given politicians a “loophole” to conclude “nothing coherent” is going on.
> Coulthart’s email emerged more than a year after Marrero pleaded with the Canadian government to carry out environmental testing he believed would show the involvement of glyphosate.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
dementia, weight loss, unsteadiness, jerking movements and facial twitches
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
It seems to me that it's doctors reaching out to Marrero. It also seems odd that [these|this] illness(es) disproportionately affected young people.
Another article I just read stated Marrero reached out to get second opinions but was blocked.
> He claims he made arrangements in 2020-21 for "subject-matter experts" to travel to New Brunswick to evaluate patients, but the province "chose not to avail itself of this invaluable expertise."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
This happens a lot in medicine: One doctor becomes locally renowned for taking in patients with hard-to-diagnose issues and giving them answers, right or wrong. Other doctors take note and then start offloading their difficult patients to other doctors happy to take them in.
It happens all the time with different doctors. Once they find a niche, they start diagnosing everyone with the same thing. A common theme is that their patients don't get better, but are happy to have someone give them a diagnosis.
In the scarier cases, it's surgeons doing this. There have been some sad periods in medicine where certain doctors starting performing unnecessary surgeries on everyone who visited them with vague symptoms. These doctors are scarily popular in a certain type of Facebook health group where patients congregate looking for answers and, lo and behold, some doctor or surgeon becomes their hero with a supposed answer to all of their questions. It usually goes on for several years before everyone realizes that nobody is getting better from these doctors and nobody ever gets rejected for a diagnosis when they visit that doctor.
It's not just a case of "we don't know", it's a case of "we've looked at everything under the sun and nothing fits".
Sounds like one of those things that needs more research.
Yes, but it also sounds like the initial stages of "research" should be taxonomy. Starting with QC'ing current testing & diagnosis standards, to have more confidence that the data is reasonably clean.
- a casual diagnosis: your problem is caused by C
- a syndrome: you have this collection of symptoms which often appear together, we don't know what causes it, we may have some treatments that can help.
The difference between these two is often not communicated well, but they are valid diagnostic categories.
There is a bigger problem with the third one:
- we have done some investigation and don't think further investigation is worth doing.
This may be a correct judgment, or it may not. But it is not a property of the patient. Essentialising it to the patient is incorrect and potentially dangerous. Especially as, it's rarely the case that they've "looked at everything under the sun". There are many reasons for stopping before that - some of them valid, but some not.
The point of giving it a name is in the second part. Its about explicitly acknowledging the limitations of medicine
For a competent doctor it's used too let a patient know they're doing their job and an acknowledgement of symptoms.
Unfortunately to a _lot_ of the field "catch-all" "diagnoses" (in intentionally separating these labels). It's the same as diagnosing someone with chronic fatigue. It's diagnosing via exclusion.
The difference between chronic fatigue and brain disorders being that you're more likely to get someone looking to make a "name for themselves" diagnosing or curing the latter vs the former...
That’ll definitely pause the rapidly progressing dementia and loss of muscle control in patients in their 20s.
When doctors have no idea what something is and aren’t willing to keep trying diagnostics and interventions, it’s always “hey maybe get some more cardio and go easy on the peanut butter cups”.
For the longest time all my data said exercise more. That was expected since I literally didn’t move all the way to a cardiac ward. Then all of a sudden it shifted to ‘exercise less, drink less coffee and sleep much more.’
I understand why doctors fall into that blind spot. It was perfect advice for me for a long time and took a lot of failure (and remarkably bad coping mechanisms) for me to figure out.
Modern medicine is basically a factory line that never ends.
Wait by “nothing” do you mean that there is no cause for the disease that the link you posted says has an unknown cause, or “nothing” do you mean that they don’t actually have anything wrong with them but you’re sharing a neat link about a disease that has an unknown cause?
I normally wouldn’t question an hour old throwaway that knows many neurologists, but what exactly are you applying the word “nothing” to here? You started with one statement, said that you don’t like a guy, and then wrote another statement that negates your first statement.
Like by “nothing” do you mean “I personally do not know, so my knowledge of what is causing this is nothing, but I want to share that I don’t like that one doctor”?
this stuff is hard, because our tools suck and everything and everyone is an an unreliable narrator
They all live in the same province too. If you're already wrong here it's hard to trust anything else
A doctor following diagnostic criteria might assign "migraine" diagnosis and provide standard recommendations for migraine management.
Another doctor seeing a quick uptick of patients with migraine symptoms will try to investigate toxins and infections.
Which doctor is doing something useful here?
That's a fairly weak claim for an appeal to authority.
It's entirely possible as for cancer clusters there is no single causative agent. That stuff demands really careful thoughtful handling, not just brush-offs. Getting the public past personal experiences to epidemiology and subsequently things like mental health, is very hard.
Look at ME and what post covid syndrome showed.
The NB thing, right now is "no common cause" and probably would stay there, but the patients deserve some basic respect and their concerns should be acknowledged. Handling small cohorts is hard. A lot of public health funding could be wasted but then things like prion disease, AGS emerge. Tick Bourne diseases in Australia receive short shrift because "they have never been seen here" but there is no domestic testing regime, it's expensive, and treatment (long term antibiotics) run counter to general views on risk/reward issues.
I'm not a health professional. I have a lot of respect for public health and epidemiology, the corner cases interest me. For ME, covid provided "evidence" which public health could use. Maybe for the NB thing something similar will emerge. I don't think Morgellens is going to turn out to be in the same bucket, I do think this is a socially acquired mental illness but perhaps I am unfair?
> CFS does not appear to impact energy to engage in online arguments.
Seriously man, you can't say you don't want to get in a back-and-forth and then drop flamebait like this. It's disrespectful and borderline trolling.
This is true? CBT and related treatments were pretty much the only thing that had been shown to be effective at reducing the severity of symptoms (no one should be making claims about whether it is changing an underlying disease process, but improving symptoms is a huge deal), and the etiology was unknown. Any responsible clinician or scientist should have been telling patients exactly that.
Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope.
Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a similar mis-folded shape when they come into contact with them. The mis-folded shape of the prion itself is what causes the mis-folding in adjacent proteins. It’s a chemical-bonding thing at the molecular level. It’s the shape of the prion that causes other proteins to take on a similar shape and become prions, etc.
Some prion diseases occur spontaneously (when a protein takes on a mis-folded configuration due to mis-transcription or random energetic impulses) and some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations.
Prion diseases are the only known transmissible diseases that do not involve the replication of a pathogen’s genetic material in a host cell. The only known prion diseases affect nervous tissues, and in humans the only known prion diseases affect brain tissues.
I’m not an expert on prion diseases, but I’ve had a bit of a fascination with them since having to report on a bunch of USDA surveillance lectures on mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) and to summarize a bunch of symposia on prion diseases in a previous life. The symptoms reported in the article sound very much like a prion disease, and the tests for CJD indicate that the doctors in the region suspect as much.
But we simply don’t have good tests for prion diseases in vivo. And prion diseases are not well understood in general, so it wouldn’t be surprising that a new one would present as something of a mystery.
It is also the case that I know very little about New Brunswick, but I will mention that prion diseases in humans are thought to be far more commonly acquired than spontaneous. The most common cause of acquisition is eating animals with endemic prion diseases; this is most often nervous tissue of venison, but rarely nervous tissue of cattle infected with BSE, which is present in Canada more than anywhere else (by a small margin).
It is also possible (but not likely) that a prion disease can arise de novo.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJrD1JcmUiE
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Alpers
* https://stmarkscollege.com.au/news/remembering-professor-mic...
As a small person in the 1960s / 1970s I'd go along with my aunts on supply runs to PNG for him and others, I met his family in Perth in the early 1980s
> some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations.
I wonder about this part. I thought consumed protein gets broken down into amino acids and new proteins are created later. Do prion proteins bypass this step?
But transmission of prions by ingestion is thought to be quite rare, as that mechanism suggests. Transmission by any means seems to be quite rare, even heritable transmission (e.g., vCJD). So that’s why it seems unlikely that whatever is happening in New Brunswick is CVD.
But if it’s not some minor mass hysteria, then maybe prions.
I don't think that that's quite right. Over the past 15 years, only 3 cases have been reported in Canadian cattle [0], while Canada has over 12 million cattle at any given moment [1]. This organization claims that Taiwan, Greece, Ecuador, and Russia are all higher-risk [2].
You could certainly argue that cases in animals could be under-reported, but human cases are much harder to hide, and only a total of 2 cases have ever been reported [3]. Canadians eat a lot of beef, so this suggests that the reported numbers for cattle are probably accurate, otherwise the human numbers would be much larger.
However, a different neurological condition (Multiple sclerosis) is more common in Canada than anywhere else in the world [4], which might have some connection with the disease discussed in the article (but this is just a wild guess).
[0]: https://inspection.canada.ca/en/animal-health/terrestrial-an...
[1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=321001...
[2]: https://www.woah.org/en/disease/bovine-spongiform-encephalop...
[3]: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/diseases/cjd/dashboard.htm...
[4]: https://globalnews.ca/news/4191203/multiple-sclerosis-canada...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15694685/
https://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/Neuroscience.2015....
There is a theory that spontaneous CJD can be spread environmentally. Apparently particles of sufficiently small size (10 nm) can pass from the nasal cavity directly into the brain via the olfactory nerve. And there was a cluster of CJD victims who were rose gardeners. Rose gardening commonly use Bone and Blood meal to feed the roses, and is typically made from cattle unfit for consumption-ie downer cows/BSE. I may have read about it in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance Book by Laurie Garrett.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_quaking-induced_conv...
At one point I checked into the ER with a resting heart rate around 200 BPM, and on some days my smartwatch couldn’t even detect a pulse because it was racing so fast.
I eventually recovered-though I still avoid wearing smart devices because seeing my heart rate triggers anxiety-but the whole period ended without a root cause and with me just being put on heartrate reducers for a while.
I really feel for anyone dealing with "mystery" medical conditions. It’s a tough place to be.
Sorry you missed out on simple, effective preventative health measures because of this misunderstanding.
And I did. He was an old guy, didn't seem at all worried. He said he worked in pro sports and a surprising number of people have it, including top athletes, try not to worry too much about it. It's been nearly 10 years and I'm still kicking so I guess they were right.
But to this day I avoid smart watches/rings, because I know it'll be nothing but anxiety inducing alarms.
What's funny, or depressing depending on how you look at it... when I told my dad the terrible news, he said 'oh yeah, that's been happening to me for years.' Like I mentioned, nobody, including my parents, seem to teach you about getting old...which is terrible for anxious people like myself.
I did, and it was. Fixed with ablation. No issues since. Other types of supraventricular tachycardia can also be cured with ablation.
In any case, they did diagnose SVT or some variant. But it pretty much went away, it seemed that getting dehydrated and/or alcohol was triggering it for me.
I actually find a smartwatch that monitors my heart rate very reassuring. I have suffered from anxiety in the past and if I think I'm having anxiety symptoms I can glance at my watch and it tells me everything is fine before I start stressing and making it manifest physically.
Not to be crude, but if my pee isn't basically clear, I immediately start slamming fluids until it is again.
A long bike ride after a stressful week and off it goes.
An interesting observation from a cardiologist to me was that cyclist have 5x the rate of rhythm disorders compared to to general population.
But… ‘It’s hard to work out if that’s drug induced or not’.
Say maybe lay off the performance enhancing drugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard...
https://en.my-ekg.com/arrhythmias/supraventricular-tachycard...
They are split on whether his thoroughness is just fueling false hopes and sending patients down unnecessary rabbit holes or if he could have potentially identified a real issue.
The fact that the investigation was disbanded simply because the patients had symptoms that can be tied to existing diseases is utterly asinine. As if there’s no reason to investigate why so many people in such a small area have similar conditions, or even to investigate whether or not the demographics of the supposed cluster are out of the ordinary in the first place. Even if there was no related cause at all, such an investigation could be used to determine that Dr. Marrero was the cause of a problem and stop him from doing harm. But instead the result was that no satisfactory conclusion was reached for the majority of people, and the patients continue to suffer.
These people need help and they are being failed by their doctors, their administrative officials and their representatives all at the same time.
That action with that excuse was arguably more harmful than anything else in this entire story.
Professionals in some fields, especially medical, often do not like to be doubted and write off other people's disagreement with them as clearly wrong. I can easily see this being the case here.
One patient, whose brother, ironically, was a physician (and one skeptical of Morgellons as anything other than delusional parasitosis), seemed earnest, if intense, in describing how Morgellons had destroyed his quality of life... but then he started describing how he felt like he was able to inadvertently affect electronic devices, especially RF-based ones, because the Morgellons "fibers" in his extremities caused some kind of interference. At this point, he sounded squarely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
However, one could very well imagine an infectious disease, with or without a dermatological component, causing delusional parasitosis. Maybe they have some virus or something that makes them think they have these "fibers?" Or a parasite? Toxoplasma gondii is known to affect inhibition. UTIs in the elderly are notorious for making them crazy.
> Cormier has featured heavily in the media coverage of the cluster, becoming a kind of poster child for the mystery disease. She was first referred to Marrero at just 18. A high school student, dancer and competitive figure skater, she had begun to experience fatigue-like symptoms and muscle soreness and then passed out at school.
> Cormier was already taking anti-anxiety medication, and the hospital emergency room doctor told her the incident was anxiety-induced.
The other young person woman contemplating MAiD is especially tragic. Hopefully the doctors do not enable her.
I once had a woman and her husband visiting to inquire about buying a house I owned in Northern Groningen, pretty much as far away from anything as you could possibly get in this crowded country. They arrived in a taxi that was blanked for the day (it turned out the man was a cab driver) and after looking the place over and liking it visibly the woman said 'oh, we really like it, but there is one more thing, I am allergic to electromagnetic radiation so let me verify that' (eye roll by the man at this point). She went to the car and came back with a box with a dial on it that she had bought online (a pretty basic field strength meter, set to the most sensitive part of the range) and started walking around muttering to herself and waving the box around like a modern day dowser.
After a while of this she came to me and said she was really sorry but she had to drop her interest because the house was absolutely infested with EM fields. In Amsterdam, where they lived, they had turned their whole apartment into a cage of Faraday with copper mesh nailed against every surface (it turned out they lived right opposite the KPN microwave tower next to the RAI so maybe she even had a point, that thing featured multiple RF links beaming 100's of Watts on tight beam links between other such towers, at some point in the past these carried our long distance phone calls before fiber came along).
I asked if I could see her box for a second and pointed it at the sun: the needle pegged instantly and she was most surprised, so I explained that what she is measuring is real, but so faint that the chances of any kind of interaction with her body are most likely delusional.
Here the conversation abruptly ended...
As for TFA: prions, the agents responsible for CJD are remarkably resilient and annoying and can make it through the foodchain across the digestive barrier and into the brain and even a single one of them can cause CJD.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/creutzfeldt-jakob-disease-cjd/
I appreciate your comment pointing to the importance of carefully evaluating individuals manifesting new onset delusional ideation or other "mental" disturbance. It might be associated with an obscure condition, but likely enough it's the result of common maladies. The worst error is thinking one knows what's going on before (or not at all) thoroughly investigating the possibilities.
Except what's more likely is that it's just psychological - which doesn't mean it doesn't have physiological treatments, it's just going to be for the psyche issue though.
Put it another way: it's well recognized eating disorders exist. But they're psychological disorders: they respond to psychological interventions and treatments, and are curable, but can also "spread" in viral like ways - i.e. an eating disorder can be induced by environmental (peer group) factors.
We don't generally posit that a virus spreads eating disorders, nor has any evidence of one been identified. And so in the same way, there's no reason to think Morgellons should have any underlying pathological cause that's any different, since none has been identified but we are aware of a number of psychological self-harm disorders (which can be amplified or spread sociologically but also just be unusual presentations of other conditions).
My theory is that this hypothesis is shut down by the fishing industry.
The Canadian government looks to have both failed and abandoned its people. It could have tested them, profiled the disease, understood its cause, and tried treatments, but it looks to just not care.
In the simple case, if it's just a neurotoxin, it might show signs of getting better upon moving out.
And you're 100% sure on that?
Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.
The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a couple years now [4][5]
It reminds me of similar stories I heard while growing up from family friends of mine who ran a construction business on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland about how cheap it was to "lobby" and get a personal meeting and photograph with Martin and Harper, and this was after Railgate.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-minister-le...
[2] - https://nsadvocate.org/2020/09/15/big-win-for-the-irvings-in...
[3] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/pcs-criticized-...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...
[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/world/canada/irving-famil...
But the doctor in the OP explicitly pointed out that they had increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:
> 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/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
Just because glyphosate is everywhere doesn't mean it can't be concentrated in a particular place.
To be clear I'm not taking a stand for the glyphosate argument at all. I just don't think your line of reasoning is a fair counterargument in this case
"Melissa Nicholson said her 59-year-old mother, who has suffered for four years with a neurological disorder, received test results indicating she had levels of glyphosate in her body that were 47 times higher than the acceptable level."
This is bizarre. Either she lives right next to a farm that's spraying it, and she's getting it blown into an open window in her house where she's breathing it, and then immediately went for a blood test... or she's somehow ingesting it in/around her house (like from a bottle of Roundup that keeps getting splashed on something she's ingesting).
Commercial forestry at JD Irving's scale largely died out in much of the US excluding Maine (where it is also has inordinate political power [1][2]).
[0] - https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
[1] - https://themainemonitor.org/maines-future-with-irving/
[2] - https://mainebiz.biz/article/the-irving-influence-a-look-at-...
Additionally, Industrial scale lumber harvesting uses magnitudes more Glyphosate than a home gardener or your local HOA.
This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.
In a province like NB where most politicians from both parties either solicits donations from Irving or are former Irving careerists(eg. the former Premier Higgs who was Irving's CFO), it gives Irving's leadership an inordinate amount of power.
My relative who owns a construction business would do something similar in Punjabi heavy ridings in BC as well - he's become fairly prominent in the Gurdawara and Mandir circuit, and because most older Punjabi Canadian voters don't really follow English language news (and in some cases cannot even speak English), they tend to defer to the candidate and party that the Gurdawara or Mandir committee makes a hukumnama for. In ridings across much of BC, there are enough of these kinds of Punjabi voters (Sikh and Hindu) that MPs will try to co-opt these committees to become their de facto enforcers for the community.
Eric Adams in NYC used similar immigrant machine politics which landed him on the FBI radar, because the old country's intel organizations continue to monitor their diasporas, and oftentimes leverage them tactically, which led him to being caught in the dragnet due to two separate investigations into Turkish [0] and Chinese [1] influence ops in NYC.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/nyregion/eric-adams-brian...
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/adams-china-camp...
Can't you unelect the MPs? Doesn't the paper thin margins increase those odds? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the issue is a parliamentry system, but rather people either aren't aware of the issues (media), or have decided (wrongly or rightly) not to care. Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems.
I don't know enough about Candaian Punjabi dispora to comment about the other stuff.
All MPs in NB need to kiss the ring, otherwise they'll face a well funded challenger.
Furthermore, 1 out of every 7 NBers are employed by JDI and Irving Oil.
> Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems
The ability to threaten a no-confidence motion means individual MPs can have an outsized impact on the executive branch.
> 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/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...
* are all the patients really sick or as sick as the symptoms he documents, or is it some kind of Munchausen induced or lied about by the doctor?
* Or are they all sick, they're just not getting the help they need because he wants to have a mystery disease?
* If they're all sick, is it then a higher prevalence than expected, so even if there is no mystery disease there is still something environmental or similar that should've been explored? Aka, is there a cluster, it's just a known disease?
Wait… what?
> But the government had decided against examining any of the patients in person
Wait… what?
The article ends in a heart breaking way. The one woman is applying for MAID. I wonder if she had better care if she could have been properly diagnosed and treated. Instead, she is going to try to end her life.
I think there's a real indictment here about how liberal Canada's MAID program is which the article glosses over.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2165181/allier-marrero-...
> In an October 2023 email exchange with another PHAC member, Coulthart, who served as the federal lead in the 2021 investigation into the New Brunswick illness, said he had been “essentially cut off” from any involvement in the issue, adding he believed the reason was political.
> Coulthart, a veteran scientist who currently heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment by the Guardian. But in the leaked email, he wrote that he believes 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 disease and Parkinson’s disease.
> Coulthart argues this phenomenon does not easily fit within “shallow paradigms” of diagnostic pathology and the complexity of the issue has given politicians a “loophole” to conclude “nothing coherent” is going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
i do think we have to think hard about how we want to deal with the rapid expansion of FNDs and social contagion.
> The couple waited eight months to get important test results from Marrero, Strickland said, as April's condition worsened. Soon Strickland could no longer manage her care. But to get her a place in assisted living he needed a letter of support from Marrero. "I think I waited four months for that letter," Strickland recalled. "I kept phoning and asking."
just sounds like medical malpractice. You shouldn't keep five hundred patients hanging if you can't handle five hundred. Makes all the talk about being empathetic and caring sound like bullshit. I feel bad for those who are probably misdiagnosed but refuse to get a second opinion thanks to the successful mental subjugation.