I grew up in New Brunswick. It is a strange place politically.

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)

The answer is "nothing"

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.

  dementia, weight loss, unsteadiness, jerking movements and facial twitches

Part of the concern is the structural opposition to clarity in a response. I don't know if this runs along party lines, or interpersonal relationships, or a state/national funding issue in public health, but something about how the problem was handled and public trust has gone badly wrong.

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.

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks.

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.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion_disease

I was diagnosed with a mysterious tachycardia last year, coincidental to this headline: while I was living in Canada.

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.

I know doctors who've worked with Marrero and they seem to be split in their opinion. They seem to agree he tends to be "excessively thorough", frequently sending tests to labs across the world. This makes him liked by desperate patients with potentially incurable diseases who want someone to "do something".

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.

I think it would be worth it to investigate cyanobacteria toxins in water over there as they can cause similar symptoms. Next thing to check would be local sea food. I feel like glyphosate is a red herring here. Heavy metals could come from frequently eating local fish/shellfish.

I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease a year ago at the age of 67. For several months I had noticed tremors in my right hand and the shaking of my right foot when I was sitting. My normally beautiful cursive writing was now small, cramped printing. And I tended to lose my balance. The neurologist had me walk down the hall and said I didn't swing my right arm. I had never noticed! I was in denial for a while, as there is no history in my family of parents and five older siblings, but I had to accept I had classic symptoms. I was taking amantadine and carbidopa/levodopa and was about to start physical therapy to strengthen muscles. I used different supplements that didn't work, so last July, I tried the PD-5 protocol—the best decision ever! My tremors eased, my energy returned, and I sleep soundly. I feel like a new woman, and I can walk and exercise again. I got the PD-5 from limitlesshealthcenter. com

This is such a frustrating situation to read about, because it is clear that Dr. Marrero is out of his depth, but it’s also clear that whatever this cluster is - real or imagined - was horribly mismanaged by the health officials in charge.

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.