They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why.

Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to News@lemmy.world – 394 points –
nytimes.com

Investigation into Canada's New Brunswick brain syndrome is being blocked by the province, whose claims that the syndrome is various existing diseases have been debunked by federal experts, who suggest that the provincial government controlled by its forestry industry is blocking the investigation to retain tourism and industry.

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[A patient] found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the stranger was his wife.

Thankfully, the patient was Canadian so the wife survived the encounter.

41 more...

I'm really glad this is getting proper media attention. This has been going on for a while and I haven't seen much outside of small blips in Canadian media until now.

Investigative journalists need to look into this. Oh wait, there aren't any left because evil corporations own 90% of the media outlets now.

Investigate Journalists still exist, they are just bloggers who tell us to do our own research.

It sucks. I'd much rather the nameless investigative journalist have the reputation of an established (and importantly, trusted) press agency standing behind them.

Investigative journalism, nowadays, is useless unless it comes from a highly trusted individual, or with the backing of a trusted entity. And that's not what we have these days. We have borderline propaganda produced by idiots who have no concept of context and barely any real understanding of the topic they are trying to convey in the first place.

Oh, and Opinion columns presented as fact. We have those too.

A well loved coworker died of Crutzfeld Jakob disease this year. That shit is terrifying.

He was in his 50s and went from normal, to nonverbal, easily startled, and not recognizing close family, to dead in a span of like 4 months.

Absolutely terrifying.

Yeah, prion diseases are truly the stuff of nightmares. No cure, can exist indefinitely in the soil, and they basically turn you into a zombie before you die a horribly painful death as your brain literally falls apart.

And there's often no way to get a conclusive diagnosis until you're dead. So you keep getting things thrown at the wall, keep hoping, and keep getting it dashed. It gets to the point where it's obvious that's what it is, but you're generally quite advanced by then.

In a tragic experiment of nature, a group of drug users in California accidentally injected themselves with a bad batch of designer heroin and began suffering from symptoms closely resembling those of Parkinson’s disease. Investigators traced the batch to a back-alley chemist who had synthesized the drugs and found that he had mistakenly created a neurotoxin precursor known as MPTP as part of the concoction.

As it turned out, MPTP also resembled aspects of the chemical makeup of paraquat, a common herbicide, opening the door to the notion that perhaps chronic exposure to synthetic toxins was triggering Parkinson’s in aging patients the same way that the bad batch of heroin had in the users. Since then, advancements in molecular and genetic testing have continued to reinforce the idea.

Recent studies have linked brain disorders with chronic exposure to cyanobacterial blooms, pesticides, air pollution and numerous other toxicants. Some researchers have gone so far as to describe Parkinson’s disease in particular as “man-made.”

Well shit. Not what I was expecting to read in this article. ALS, Parkinsons, and Alzheimers are the three diseases that most terrify me. Something that hollows out who you are, leaving you semi conscious in a waking prison built of your own body. You can lose limbs and still be you. You can't lose your brain and still be you. It's a disease that destroys the ephemeral "you," leaving only a husk of your former self. To think that we could be the ones causing it, with our massive over-use of herbicides, is equally terrifying. Because just like with PFAS exacerbating all cancers, there are rich, influential firms with powerful lobbying groups actively fighting against the very regulation that could save us.

This was actively covered up through the strong-arming of the person in charge of the autopsies.

Dr. Gerard Jansen, the neuropathologist in charge of autopsies for the eight cluster patients, had published a shocking conclusion: All eight patients died not from a mysterious illness but from known diseases, including cancer, Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

In December 2022, Marrero found a toxicology lab in Quebec that was willing to test patients for four different types of pesticides, including glyphosate, a herbicide that is regularly used as part of the forestry industry in New Brunswick. He had noticed a pattern of new referrals peaking in the late summer and early fall, when pesticide use is at its highest, and wondered if there could be a connection. When the lab accepted a sample from one patient, Marrero quickly sent over a hundred more. The results were astonishing. Ninety percent of Marrero’s patients came back with elevated amounts of glyphosate in their blood, in one case as high as 15,000 times the test’s lowest detectable concentration.

Part of the reason Marrero was able to get the tests done in Quebec was that in 2021 the province officially recognized the link between glyphosate and an increased risk for Parkinson’s disease. Recent studies have shown that glyphosate crosses the blood-brain barrier and that chronic exposure can lead to neurological inflammation that can trigger Alzheimer’s disease.

I completely agree with everything you're saying, but I want to point out one thing that I absolutely hate about your citation:

in one case as high as 15,000 times the test’s lowest detectable concentration

This gives 0 context at all. I know scientific literacy is terrible in America, but this means nothing.

What is the lowest detectable concentration? Is it 1 PPT? 15000 PPT is what, 15 PPM? Is that bad? I don't know.

This type of wording is used intentionally to make things sound worse than they are, and it works.

I'm not saying they aren't, I'm saying I don't know if they are or not. This quote did nothing to inform me of how bad it is, just a fact that is entirely meaningless on its own, without context or education. If anything, it enraged me without knowing the facts, and that's (potentially) very dangerous writing.

As if I needed another reason to feel good about not putting herbicides and pesticides on my yard. Who knows what prolonged exposure to that junk is doing to people that we don't even begin to understand yet.

Hmm, they shut down the 48 patients suffering from odd neurodegerative diseases in 2021....

Marrero told me that since the province concluded its investigation, things had gotten worse. The number of undiagnosable patients currently under his care has risen to more than 430, 111 of whom are under age 45. Thirty-nine have died. By Marrero’s accounting, New Brunswick is now the center of one of the most prolific young-onset dementia clusters in the world. “Nobody who was involved in this can pretend they didn’t know,” he said.

What the fuckkk. :/

Interestingly, the wikipedia article on glyphosates says basically nothing about their role in Parkinson's and instead focuses on debunking cancer claims.

Absolutely not suspicious at all.

It's because Wikipedia requires sourcing on claims and Bayer puts in extra effort to get scientific papers removed or "debunked" (find the tiniest, irrelevant flaw and then lobby hard to get it retracted).

If you’re convinced and have receipts, you can report the user to the COI noticeboard.

They aren't saying the issue is Wikipedia. They're saying that the actual sources are being either revoked by the publishers, or excessive money is dumped into studies that would muddy the water about the findings of any negative sources.

Ah, makes sense. But my optimist side says that surely the paper would be republished.

From what I understand from the article is that the correlation is there, but no causality (yet). I find it extremely good how cautious the doctor is phrasing his analysis and the article is also not blowing up where nothing is proven.

Figuring out the Parkinson's linkage is challenging too, because glyphosate is just one of many chemicals used in agricultural settings. It wouldn't be surprising for the correlation to be caused by another chemical with strong evidence of casual linkage to Parkinson's that itself is correlated with glyphosate, like Parquat. (Since Parquat is a herbicide, places that used it may also use (or have switched to) glyphosate.) Totally worth continued scientific study.

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.

This is frightening.

But these anxieties and sleep problems quickly gave way to more acute presentations: limb pain and trouble balancing, teeth chattering and shocklike muscle spasms so violent that some patients could no longer sleep in the same bed as their spouses. Many patients developed vision problems; some experienced terrifying hallucinations. (“Like daydreaming,” Marrero says, “but a nightmare.”) As the sickness continued to manifest, muscles wasted away and cognitive decline set in. Some patients died; others plateaued in various states of distress.

And I made it about two more paragraphs after this before closing the window. This is just too much bad news first thing in the morning. Sigh.

The Canadaland podcast has been covering this story for a while now.

Canadaland has lost a lot of credibility with me after all the shit Jesse Brown has been spewing post October 7.

I won’t deny that their coverage of this issue has been good though

Canadaland is much more than just Jesse Brown though.

I'm aware of that, but when the founder and main host is spreading false and misleading information on the show, it calls into question the whole enterprise.

I do occasionally tune in to episodes not hosted by him, with some skepticism if the issue is in any way politically charged.

I think I've listened to every Canadaland episode since like 2016 or so, and I've yet to hear him say anything even remotely approaching what people accuse him of.

That said I don't follow his X account or anything.

https://archive.is/qiDwJ

Thanks for the preservation, but it’s probably better to read the article from the source (which I have unlocked with the gift function) while it’s still up.

(Also, archive.today links automatically redirect to the fastest domain for you.)

it’s probably better to read the article from the source

Not when the source article requires javascript to display. Some of us don't let arbitrary web sites run scripts on our computers.

Holy shit that is dystopic as hell.

God how I fucking hate these trope-y headlines that modern journalists think will make them competitive with the Internet

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