Context: Moncton is built on a swamp. It has _a lot_ of mosquitoes during summer and 3 to 5 ft of snow during winter. It had (has?) the lowest home prices in all of Canada because of this. NB also has the lowest income per family (or next to lowest, Nunavut might be lower).
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.
Anything that pokes into one mammal and then into another might be able to transmit basically anything. This is why doctors dont reuse needles no matter the percieved risk.
> 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.
Given other comments on this thread regarding large densities of mosquitoes, this might actually make sense if large amounts of insecticides are used in the region.
That was my knee-jerk scenario to think of too - especially given the rising prevalence of Chronic Wasting Disease in the US states near that part of Canada.
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.
> Jansen presented his findings to 20 to 30 colleagues in which he suggested that the eight patients previously diagnosed with the novel neurological syndrome, "represent a group of misclassified clinical diagnoses", and that they "died from a variety of causes, including cancer, Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer's disease"
It seems this isn’t that complex of a case really though? Upon autopsy they just had normal issues.
I won’t presume to suggest a cause, but it’s worth acknowledging how terrifying it is that any of a number of compounds in a relatively small dose could cause wild effects on the human mind or body.
ICYMI there has been a ongoing 20+ year epidemic of kidney disease in Central American manual laborers, no one has pinned down an exact cause yet but it definitely seems to be heat exposure related. Not quite as scary as something that resembles CJD but lots of researchers looking into for a long time without finding definitive cause.
There have been sufferers ranging from age 18-85, and it affects both men and women in approximately equal numbers. Both of those things are highly suggestive of some kind of environmental cause. If this were an episode of House, a lot of peoples' homes would be getting broken into right about now.
Well, yes. This has always been the case, I'm not sure it's worth being especially terrified over it.
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.
The opposite should be investigated as well. The deficiencies in nutrients like copper, selenium or molybdenum are generally only known in animals, and rarely investigated among people.
Copper deficiency can cause various symptoms like weight loss, loss of pigment, indigestion, or neurological problems. It seems that molybdenum deficiency shifts the symptoms towards neurological, while the rest happens from copper deficiency alone.
I think some people have been talking about selenium deficiency since the 1970s. The trace metals are something of a problem since it's also possible to have harmful effects from too much.
The US Army tested Agent Orange in an area near Gagetown, about 80 miles from Moncton, in 1967. Maybe some drums of Agent Orange got left in the woods somewhere in the area and are leaking into the water table today?
I used to hang around someone who's dad was allegedly doused in Agent Orange in the New Brunswick woods, possibly around that time. Their father apparently developed a lot of mental health issues, and they were also born with some severe ones themselves.
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.
It’s both frustrating and disheartening that the investigation into this disease has been ongoing since 2000. Sometimes, I can’t help but feel that we, Canadians, lack a sense of urgency. These individuals have endured years of suffering. I hope we get some breakthroughs now, for their sake.
For their sake certainly, but frankly for all our sakes also. I've never felt comfortable knowing this is going on both because obviously it's awful for the people involved but selfishly... we can't just have stuff like this happening in the country, doesn't matter if it's rural or city, shit like this is a sign of a dysfunctional society at large and it's how things like COVID-19 happen, the feds not taking it very seriously and superseding the Provence and municipality is not good in instances like this, they should have boots on the ground years ago with an answer, this is insane to me. (sorry for the rant, just dives me nuts what the country is coming to, and it's not politics imo, it's us as Canadians who are the problem right now)
> What I do not understand in this case is why politics are involved?
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.
Anything public ends up as political. Whether effort is spent on this or not is a question of money, and as always people have to advocate for their own health. Being alive is a political issue.
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.
This just baseless conjecture, and even somewhat conspiracy-theory adjacent, but my best guess is one of the Irving families' companies is somehow involved here.
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.
Irving is a local logging company that uses chemicals to kill a specific type of wood (hard wood if I remember correctly). The Irvings basically own NB afaik. There were also some protests about fracking maybe 10 years back because of the chemicals used.
Maybe post-catch or something— like a cleaning chemical used in fish markets or something— but one branch of my family are lobstermen in nearby waters south of the border and I haven’t heard of any such thing happening in their communities.
I have connections to lobster fishermen and woodsmen working Irving woods here in Maine and neither have any experience like this. Does Irving spray defoliant in the US?
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.
there is an open landfill near-by. communities in the finger lakes new york region have histories of "mystery illness" that correlate to landfill ground plume
Readit News
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.
When was this? Moncton is the biggest and fastest growing city in New Brunswick.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1grpkok/...
Dead Comment
Can mosquitoes transmit prions?
Deleted Comment
> 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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
Deleted Comment
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.