2021: Cartoon by Chappatte, Enjoy your meal of glyphosate!
Alarming: Common Herbicide Linked to Lasting Brain Damage by Arizona State University, December 16, 2024, SciTechDaily
Glyphosate exposure intensifies Alzheimer’s disease-like pathology in mice, even after a prolonged period without exposure.
The human brain is an incredibly adaptable organ, often capable of healing itself even from significant trauma. However, new research reveals for the first time that even brief contact with a common herbicide can cause lasting damage to the brain, with effects that may persist long after direct exposure has ended.
In a groundbreaking new study, Arizona State University researcher Ramon Velazquez and his colleagues at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), part of City of Hope, demonstrate that mice exposed to the herbicide glyphosate develop significant brain inflammation, which is associated with neurodegenerative disease.
The findings suggest the brain may be much more susceptible to the damaging effects of the herbicide than previously thought. Glyphosate is one of the most pervasive herbicides used in the U.S. and worldwide.
Now we see why Americans voted in multiple felon rapist liar ass-wipe Adolf Trump.
The research, which appears in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, identifies an association between glyphosate exposure in mice and symptoms of neuroinflammation, as well as accelerated Alzheimer’s disease-like pathology. This study tracks both the presence and impact of glyphosate’s byproducts in the brain long after exposure ends, showing an array of persistent, damaging effects on brain health.
Glyphosate exposure in mice also resulted in premature death and anxiety-like behaviors, which replicates findings by others examining glyphosate exposure in rodents. Further, the scientists discovered these symptoms persisted even after a 6-month recovery period during which exposure was discontinued.
Concerning Byproducts in the Brain
Additionally, the investigation demonstrated that a byproduct of glyphosate —aminomethylphosphonic acid—accumulated in brain tissue, raising serious concerns about the chemical’s safety for human populations.
“Our work contributes to the growing literature highlighting the brain’s vulnerability to glyphosate,” Velazquez says. “Given the increasing incidence of cognitive decline in the aging population, particularly in rural communities where exposure to glyphosate is more common due to large-scale farming, there is an urgent need for more basic research on the effects of this herbicide.”
Velazquez is a researcher with the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center at the ASU Biodesign Institute and an assistant professor with the School of Life Sciences. He is joined by first author Samantha K. Bartholomew, a PhD candidate in the Velazquez Lab, other ASU colleagues, and co-senior author Patrick Pirrotte, associate professor with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and researcher with the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in California.
According to the Centers for Disease Research, farm laborers, landscape workers, and others employed in agriculture are more likely to be exposed to glyphosate through inhalation or skin contact.
Additionally, the new findings suggest that ingestion of glyphosate residues on foods sprayed with the herbicide potentially poses a health hazard. Most people living in the U.S. have been exposed to glyphosate during their lifetime.
“My hope is that our work drives further investigation into the effects of glyphosate exposure, which may lead to a reexamination of its long-term safety and perhaps spark discussion about other prevalent toxins in our environment that may affect the brain,” Bartholomew says.
The team’s findings build on earlier ASU research that demonstrates a link between glyphosate exposure and a heightened risk for neurodegenerative disorders.
The previous study showed that glyphosate crosses the blood-brain barrier, a protective layer that typically prevents potentially harmful substances from entering the brain. Once glyphosate crosses this barrier, it can interact with brain tissue and appears to contribute to neuroinflammation and other harmful effects on neural function.
The EPA considers certain levels of glyphosate safe for human exposure, asserting that the chemical is minimally absorbed into the body and is primarily excreted unchanged.
However, recent studies, including this one, indicate that glyphosate, and its major metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid, can persist in the body and accumulate in brain tissue over time, raising questions about existing safety thresholds and whether glyphosate use is safe at all.
Which fairy tale would you like to hear?
That one about the harmlessness of glyphosate!
Herbicide may attack more than weeds
Glyphosate is the world’s most heavily applied herbicide, used on crops including corn, soybeans, sugar beets, alfalfa, cotton, and wheat. Since the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant crops (genetically engineered to be sprayed with glyphosate without dying) in 1996, glyphosate usage has surged, with applications predominately in agricultural settings.
The U.S. Geological Survey notes approximately 300 million pounds of glyphosate are used annually in the United States alone. Although glyphosate levels are regulated on foods imported into the United States, enforcement and specific limits can vary. Due to its widespread use, the chemical is found throughout the food chain. It persists in the air, accumulates in soils, and is found in surface and groundwater.
Despite being considered safe by the EPA, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies glyphosate as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” and emerging research, including this study, points to its potential role in worsening neurodegenerative diseases by contributing to pathologies, like those seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
The chemical works by inhibiting a specific enzyme pathway in plants that is crucial for producing essential amino acids. However, its impact extends beyond the intended weed, grass, and plant targets, negatively affecting the biological systems in mammals, as demonstrated by its persistence in brain tissue and its role in inflammatory processes.
“Herbicides are used heavily and ubiquitously around the world,” says Pirrotte, associate professor in TGen’s Early Detection and Prevention Division, director of the Integrated Mass Spectrometry Shared Resource at TGen and City of Hope, and senior author of the paper. “These findings highlight that many chemicals we regularly encounter, previously considered safe, may pose potential health risks. However, further research is needed to fully assess the public health impact and identify safer alternatives.”
Is glyphosate safe to use at all?
The researchers hypothesized that glyphosate exposure would induce neuroinflammation in control mice and worsen neuroinflammation in Alzheimer’s model mice, causing elevated Amyloid-β and tau pathology and worsening spatial cognition after recovery. Amyloid-β and Tau are key proteins that comprise plaques and tau tangles, the classic diagnostic markers of Alzheimer’s disease. Plaques and tangles disrupt neural functioning and are directly linked to memory loss and cognitive decline.
The experiments were conducted over 13 weeks, followed by a six-month recovery period. The main metabolite, aminomethylphosphonic acid, was detected in the brains of both normal and transgenic mice with Alzheimer’s pathology. Transgenic mice are genetically modified to carry genes that cause them to develop Alzheimer’s-like symptoms as they age. This allows researchers to study the progression and effects of the disease in a controlled laboratory setting.
The researchers tested two levels of glyphosate exposure: a high dose, similar to levels used in earlier research, and a lower dose that is close to the limit used to establish the current acceptable dose in humans.
This lower dose still led to harmful effects in the brains of mice, even after exposure ceased for months. While reports show that most Americans are exposed to glyphosate daily, these results show that even a short period could potentially cause neurological damage.
Glyphosate caused a persistent increase in inflammatory markers in the brain and blood, even after the recovery period. This prolonged inflammation could drive the progression of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, indicating even temporary glyphosate exposure can lead to enduring inflammatory processes that affect brain health.
The data emphasizes that glyphosate exposure may be a significant health concern for human populations. The researchers stress the need for continued vigilance and intensified surveillance of glyphosate neurological and other long-term negative health effects.
“Our goal is to identify environmental factors that contribute to the rising prevalence of cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases in our society,” Velazquez says. “By unveiling such factors, we can develop strategies to minimize exposures, ultimately improving the quality of life for the growing aging population.”
Reference: “Glyphosate exposure exacerbates neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s disease-like pathology despite a 6-month recovery period in mice” by Samantha K. Bartholomew, Wendy Winslow, Ritin Sharma, Khyatiben V. Pathak, Savannah Tallino, Jessica M. Judd, Hector Leon, Julie Turk, Patrick Pirrotte and Ramon Velazquez, 4 December 2024, Journal of Neuroinflammation. DOI: 10.1186/s12974-024-03290-6
The National Institutes on Aging, National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and ASU Biodesign Institute funded this study.
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Holt could ban glyphosate if link to mystery illness is found 3:18 Min. by CBC News, Dec 23, 2024No mention of the study above linking glyphosate to lasting brain damage.
Premier Susan Holt says she’ll act, if a new investigation finds there’s a connection between neurological symptoms and the herbicide.
Dear Premier Holt, I think the above study gives you what you need to ban glyphosate in NB, including used for profit raping by Irving Oil.
Premier ready to ban glyphosate if link found to mystery brain illness, Premier says residents fear herbicide’s impacts; federal scientist says it isn’t showing up in harmful amounts by Jacques Poitras, CBC News, Dec 23, 2024
Premier Susan Holt says her government would be willing to ban the herbicide glyphosate if a new investigation finds a link to the purported mystery brain illness that a Moncton neurologist says he is tracking.
The province has launched a new investigation into the hundreds of cases, saying the symptoms have sparked fear among many New Brunswickers that needs to be addressed.
“New Brunswickers are afraid about what glyphosate might do, and the mysterious neurological illness has given them reason to be more afraid,” Holt said in a year-end interview with CBC News.
“So we have to make sure that we know exactly what that chemical is doing, and where and when.”
If a link is found, “then we need to eliminate that exposure for New Brunswickers.”
But Holt emphasized the idea was hypothetical because “we don’t have good science to tell us that that is what’s making New Brunswickers sick.”Now we do.
Glyphosate is used in agriculture and in industrial forestry operations.
Major logging companies use it to thin some forms of forest vegetation near the ground so young trees get more sun and rain and have a better chance to grow.That’s not the reason, greed is the reason. The trees would grow fine without glyphosate, just not as profitably and the forests would be much healthier and wildfire resistant.
Its impact on human health has been debated in New Brunswick for more than a decade, and Holt noted activists have focused their lobbying on the forest sector.
“There’s a curious distinction that’s being made from folks who accept it in agriculture but don’t accept it in forestry,” she said.
A 2023 study by the Canadian Forest Service I do not trust them or their study, besides, even low amounts of glyphosate previously considered “safe” now are linked to damaging brains!collected 296 samples in watersheds where glyphosate had been applied and detected the herbicide in only one of them.
That single sample was measured at 17 parts per billion — far below the threshold for safe drinking water of 280 parts per billion.That is likely not safe given the new study
Even that threshold would require someone to drink water with that amount of glyphosate “every day for their entire life” for there to be a risk to their health, said Chris Edge, the lead research scientist on the study.Bingo, he proves the Canadian Forest Service is not to be trusted!
“What I think the body of work that we’ve done now has shown is that glyphosate is present in the environment, but is present at concentrations that are lower than where we’d expect adverse effects to occur,” he said.But, now we know harms to the brain do occur even from brief exposures, and that the glyphosate by products in the brain accumulate over time, so even extremely low levels in the environment are likely causing significant adverse effects across Canada, notably in NB, AB, SK and BC where glyphosate is heavily sprayed.
According to Edge, glyphosate binds to soil and sediment. That, plus the ban on spraying it when it’s windy and the required buffer areas near rivers, make it unlikely the herbicide will reach a watershed.Pfffff! Have you been watching the heat extremes from human pollution caused global warming causing dramatic increases in amount of water dumped in atmospheric rivers/bomb cyclones causing extreme runofff and erosion? I expect with our pollution ever increasing, worsening the heat extremes and dumps of rain, glyphosate is reaching watersheds everywhere. Time to ban glyphosate use across Canada.
Another study he conducted found levels of glyphosate in vegetation dropped below the risk threshold 18 days after spraying — and wildlife would have to eat that vegetation, with that amount of glyphosate, for their entire lives to become ill.What about dementia? Lots of humans and wildlife/fish are exposed to/eat foods contaminated with/covered in glyphosate, suffering cumulative brain damage. Yeah! We’re not getting sick, we’re just damaging the most important organ in our bodies – every fucking day.
Moncton neurologist Dr. Alier Marrero has suggested that glyphosate has contributed to blue-green algae blooms that can emit toxins that affect the brain.I thought that too, but with this new study, glyphosate seems to be handling brain damage directly and all on its own. Algae blooms might cumulatively add to the problem.
Edge says algae can feed on phosphate molecules in glyphosate, “but for that to work, glyphosate would have to be present in the rivers,” and his study found only that one sample.I don’t trust the forest service’s study. As with the “studies” done in Alberta to intentionally blame nature for the many water wells contaminated after nearby shallow fracturing, there are endless ways to fuck with data to get the end result the forest service wants or Irving Oil is perhaps demanding, which is continued unlimited excessive glyphosate spraying.
“So [it’s] theoretically plausible, but in reality we’re not detecting glyphosate, so it’s unlikely to be leading … to cyanobacteria blooms.”But, seems glyphosate is damaging brains before the killer herbicide contaminates water.
Edge said his research was funded entirely by the federal government and was not paid for or supported by the forest industry.Doesn’t matter in rape and pillage Canada. Industry controls our gov’ts provincially and federally, and controls studies done with our tax dollars. I will be watching with fascination to see if Premier Holt bans glyphosate based on this new study, which would the responsible precautionary thing to do.
Sarah Nesbitt, one of Marrero’s patients whose urine samples showed levels of glyphosate, said she believes the herbicide and a mix of other environmental factors contributed to her illness. Nesbitt says she started experiencing symptoms after aerial forestry spraying near her home in Steeves Mountain near Moncton.
She welcomed the new provincial investigation.
“Everything they said they were going to do, they’ve done, so I have to give them that,” she said.
In 2021, officials from J.D. Irving Ltd., the province’s largest forestry company, told a committee of MLAs that banning glyphosate would be “disastrous” oh my, poor Irving Oil Babies. Banning it would protect your brains! Imagine the Hell of that!and fears about it were not science-based but sprang from misinformation circulating on social media.Typical lying fucking assholes. Disinformation and misinformation on glyphosate come from Monstanto-Bayer, our “regulators” and the raping companies profiting off using it.
Researchers were constantly looking for better ways to thin vegetation but “the alternatives are really challenging,” said the company’s director of science Andrew Willett.Sir, I think you are better suited to working for Disney.
“We will not stop trying to find alternative ways. But today, this is the most effective way to deal with that early vegetation.”I bet Irving Oil isn’t bothering to look. And even if they are looking, there are many ways to ensure not seeing.
Holt told CBC News that glyphosate is already “a heavily controlled substance that comes with processes of regulation and certification,” Hogwash! Anyone can spray it anywhere, including kids, and can ignore the instructions. A glyphosate plane repeatedly flies over my home and land, and sprays neighbouring fields even when it’s wildly windy. Have I ever seen a regulator inspecting them or stopping them when it’s too windy? Nope. Like frac’ers, they don’t give a shit, largely because they believe the lies by the company and so called regulators, and because more money for the rich “über alles” is the regulation of the day, no matter how many citizens are sickened, suffering and or murdered.and the government could look at further restrictions on how it’s used.
In an earlier interview with CBC News on the mystery brain illness, Holt said some patients were concerned because “we know the kind of lobby that exists to support the continued use of that chemical.” All the more reason to ban glyphosate, or at the very least, ban lobbying that pimps it.
In the year-end interview on Dec. 9, she said that comment was a reference to manufacturers of the herbicide that are “in regular contact” with Health Canada to ensure regulators continue allowing it to be sold in Canada.
She said it was not a reference to lobbying by J.D. Irving Ltd.Well, I think Irving needs to be banned from using it, and lobbying for it
“I haven’t been lobbied personally on this,” she said.
The previous Progressive Conservative government concluded in 2022 that the cases Marrero diagnosed didn’t have a common cause.
“No such syndrome exists,” then-Health Minister Dorothy Shephard said at the time.
Holt’s health minister, Dr. John Dornan, told CBC News last week he didn’t want to say definitively yet whether there is a single neurological illness.
“I wouldn’t speculate on that. I think the fact that it’s been raised means that it’s possible,” said Dornan.
“It would be, I think, naive and inappropriate for me as an individual, or as a physician, or as a New Brunswicker to say yes, or no there isn’t. I think we need a more thorough review of the data.”
That patient data is now being collected as part of the new investigation, he said.
Articles below from a variety of years
They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why. Doctors in Canada have identified dozens of patients with similar, unexplained symptoms — a scientific puzzle that has now become a political maelstrom by Greg Donahue, Aug 14, 2024, The New York Times
Greg Donahue is a writer in New York who covers crime, corruption and politics. He interviewed two dozen doctors, patients and politicians for this article.
In late 2018, after an otherwise-normal Christmas holiday, Laurie Beatty started acting strange. An 81-year-old retired contractor, he grew unnaturally quiet and began poring over old accounting logs from a construction business he sold decades earlier, convinced that he had been bilked in the deal.
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.
Doctors at the Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Center in Moncton, the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, zeroed in on an exceedingly rare condition — Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, caused by prions, misfolding proteins in the brain — as the most likely culprit. The doctors explained this to Beatty’s children, Tim and Jill, and said they would run additional tests to confirm the post-mortem diagnosis. Three months later, when the siblings returned to the office of their father’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, that’s what they were expecting to hear. Instead, Marrero told them that Laurie’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob test had come back negative. “We were all looking at one another,” Tim says, “because we were all very confused.” If Creutzfeldt-Jakob hadn’t killed their father, then what had? What Marrero said next was even more unsettling.
“There’s something going on,” they recall him saying. “And I don’t know what it is.”
It turned out that Laurie Beatty was just one of many local residents who had gone to Marrero’s office exhibiting similar, inexplicable symptoms of neurological decline — more than 20 in the previous four years. The first signs were often behavioral. One patient fell asleep for nearly 20 hours straight before a friend took her to the hospital; another 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.
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.
In each case, Marrero struggled to determine a definitive diagnosis. The symptoms belonged to a broad spectrum of neurological disorders, but there was always something starkly atypical about the patients’ presentation. Their decline was too swift, or not swift enough; they lacked key indicators of a particular disease; or they failed to respond to known therapies, a hallmark of how neurologists diagnose conditions. Even more alarming, many of the patients were unusually young. Nearly half were middle-aged, and a few were in their 20s and 30s. At a presentation to a panel of experts at the University of British Columbia, Marrero recalled “crying out for help,” as he puts it. “What else can I do in terms of testing? What am I missing?”
The Beattys say Marrero explained that he had other patients in similar situations, but because of confidentiality laws, he couldn’t say more. “We were scared to death,” Tim told me. He and Jill wondered whether some overlooked genetic factor might put them at risk for the same fate as their father.
Because many of the symptoms resembled those of Creutzfeldt-Jacob, Marrero had been reporting each case to the Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease Surveillance System, a federal monitoring program within the Public Health Agency of Canada, and as his referrals began to pile up, scientists at the agency had started to take notice. Six months after Marrero revealed his concerns to the Beattys, a working group of experts was convened to investigate. By then, Marrero had come to believe that his patients were suffering from a previously undescribed illness. “When you have not seen something,” he later told a reporter, “it is very likely that we have not learned to see it.”
His federal colleagues were inclined to agree. According to P.H.A.C. scientists, both the number of undiagnosable patients and, more important, their ages were “unprecedented at the national and provincial levels.” They called it the “New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown etiology.” In March 2021, when a memo alerting local doctors to the existence of the mysterious illness leaked to the press, the news made headlines around the world. Marrero’s patients and their families hoped that an explanation for their suffering would soon be revealed.
Three years later, however, no satisfactory explanation has been found, and the New Brunswick syndrome remains shrouded in mystery — and controversy. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether something in the environment may be responsible, at least in part, for the onset of the patients’ illness. It’s a question that underscores not only the tangled relationship between public health and patients’ rights, but also the inherently confounding nature of neurological conditions. In the absence of answers, what began as a puzzling medical mystery has been transformed into a situation rife with suspicion: accusations of nefarious plots to silence doctors, scientists’ leaking internal documents and a growing community of patients and advocates intent on proving the government’s hand in a coverup.
“We don’t have tinfoil hats,” Tim Beatty said of the provincial government last year. “But if you are looking to breed a group of people to believe in a conspiracy theory, they have done a fantastic job.”
Neurodegenerative diseases are among the leading causes of death and disability worldwide, yet their origins largely remain mysterious. We don’t know what triggers them in some people over others or exactly how the interplay of various risk factors contributes. Genetics clearly play a role, as do aging and lifestyle considerations like smoking and heavy drinking. But genetics alone account for only a small percentage of cases of the best-known brain disorders — Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. The remaining cases appear to be a product of a complex interplay of genetic predisposition and environmental factors, including exposure to toxic substances, which a growing number of researchers believe may be responsible for triggering the onset of degeneration. The precise mechanisms behind that triggering, however, remain stubbornly elusive.
This is partly down to the newness of the science. It was only in the early 1980s that the first tangible evidence connecting a toxicant with neurodegeneration came to light. 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.”
Despite the growing consensus, the link remains diabolically difficult to prove. After all, it’s not ethical to feed people toxic substances and then watch them get sick. Scientists are largely constrained to studying a given toxin’s structure and effects in a lab setting, or trying to connect the dots between disease clusters on the ground and the presence of that toxin in the environment. Even then, the surrounding variables are so complex and numerous that proving a definitive connection is nearly impossible. Complicating the issue further is the fact that many symptoms of neurological diseases overlap, making a definitive diagnosis hard to pin down even under ideal circumstances.
In New Brunswick, the evidence for a shared environmental contaminant was strong. The patients were grouped in two primary locations: the Moncton area and the Acadian Peninsula, a francophone region home to picturesque fishing villages and blueberry farms along New Brunswick’s northeast coast. Investigators wondered whether a common source of food or water might explain the geographic clustering. There were also a number of households with multiple patients who were not genetically linked: husbands and wives, stepfathers and stepdaughters, a nursing student and her ward. These “close contact” cases were difficult to explain outside of a common exposure.
The hard part was figuring out what that exposure might be. During weekly meetings in the spring of 2021, Marrero and his colleagues consulted experts in zoonotic disease, water science and pathology in an effort to whittle down a long list of hazardous environmental agents to a select few worth targeting in their research. The goal was a full-scale epidemiological study — “boots on the ground,” as one senior scientist put it — including interviews, diagnostic tests and environmental and tissue sampling. Many of the scientists saw the situation as a rare opportunity: If this potential cluster of patients really was being caused by a toxic substance, it would offer a rare chance to study the toxin-brain relationship in real time.
Initially, government support for the study was robust. At a briefing in April 2021, Dr. Theresa Tam, the country’s chief public-health officer, advised the working group to engage the widest expert network possible and ensured that the investigation wouldn’t be tied up in bureaucracy. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research offered the province $5 million to help fund a two-year clinical investigation.
But then something changed. A month later, on the afternoon of May 6, 2021, an email from the provincial health department began to circulate saying that all currently scheduled meetings would be “paused” until provincial researchers “had the time to delve more deeply into existing data.” Meetings that had been planned months in advance were wiped from the calendar. Field experts and neurologists were left waiting on Zoom links that never came. “There was a stop, suddenly, abruptly, with no apparent explanation,” says Marrero, who called the decision “unusual by any standards.”
Things grew even murkier 10 days later, when Marrero says he got a call on his cellphone from Dr. Hanan Smadi, the province’s acting lead epidemiologist, telling him to stop reporting potential new cases to the provincial authorities. Marrero was appalled. The number of patients in the cluster — at the time 48, eight dead — was continuing to rise. According to Marrero, when he asked where the request was coming from, Smadi told him, “It comes from higher up.” The province also sent a note to the federal authorities asking them to take a “step back from public communications” because of “heightened sensitivities in New Brunswick,” a request that one senior scientist told a reporter from a Canadian magazine was tantamount to being “muzzled.” (Public Health New Brunswick says that Smadi never reached out to Marrero and told him to stop reporting cases. The agency declined to make its employees, including Smadi, available for comment.)
Provincial officials would later claim that their reason for pausing the federal working group’s involvement was largely jurisdictional — because the patients in the cluster were from New Brunswick, it was the province’s responsibility to lead an investigation — and a few weeks later, Dorothy Shephard, New Brunswick’s health minister at the time, announced a province-run surveillance study to examine potential dietary and geographic links between cluster members, as well as an oversight committee that included six neurologists to independently investigate the unknown illness. The new committee would, as the announcement put it, “provide expert second opinions” and “rule out other potential causes.” Unaware at the time that the federal scientists had been sidelined, patients and their advocates celebrated the news.
Internal emails from that period, however, call the province’s rationale into question: They appear to show New Brunswick officials strategizing to keep the investigation from spreading to the federal level. In one example, Smadi notes that two cluster patients who had moved out of the province should not be interviewed specifically because their inclusion would make the effort multijurisdictional.
Suspicions also quickly surfaced about the objectives of the study Shephard had promised. A few days after the announcement, Kat Lanteigne, a New Brunswick native and a founder of BloodWatch, a nonprofit that promotes a safe public blood system in Canada, received a cryptic text on her cellphone from an anonymous source claiming that the province was not taking its investigation seriously.
Lanteigne began asking around among sources in both the provincial and federal governments and was disturbed by what she learned. Rather than implementing the “boots on the ground” approach recommended by the federal scientists, it appeared that New Brunswick officials had decided instead to relitigate the working group’s original findings — namely, whether a cluster of patients existed at all. They apparently were not even trying to investigate the possibility of a toxicant: “Not one single environmental sample had left the province,” Lanteigne says. “Not water, not food.” If the oversight committee concluded that the patients weren’t linked by a common condition, then there was little point in a strapped public-health department trying to find one. “I think they’ve pulled the plug from the wall and nobody knows,” Lanteigne remembers thinking.
Lanteigne reached out to Steve Ellis, who started a Facebook group for patients and family members after his own father, Roger, was referred to Marrero, and told him what she had learned. “Do you want to fight back?” she asked. Before long, Ellis amassed a cohort of patients and family members who shared deep misgivings about the province’s methods. For one, the investigation was happening almost entirely in secret. Not only was Marrero kept at a distance, ostensibly so that he wouldn’t bias the work of the oversight-committee neurologists, but so were the patients. “We had no idea what was going on,” says Stacie Quigley Cormier, whose daughter Gabrielle Cormier was the youngest confirmed case in the cluster. “There was just crickets on all ends.” The patients had invested so much hope in the possibility of an answer that the silence became maddening. Gabrielle, then 20 years old and struggling to walk without the help of a cane, asked to be checked into a hospital for psychiatric support while her family waited to hear from the public-health officials in charge.
In October 2021, news arrived that further complicated the case. 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. Tim Beatty was driving to work when he heard on the radio that the autopsy results had been made public. “I can literally point on the road where I was,” he says, “because I almost drove off.”
As it turned out, Jansen had stopped believing in the cluster months before the autopsies leaked. In an email to colleagues that May, he offered what’s known in the world of public health as a “null hypothesis,” the premise that there is no relationship between findings until overwhelming evidence proves otherwise. Jansen hadn’t seen any signs of a uniform pathology in the brains of patients during the autopsies and was wary of the various theories put forward by the working group. “The available evidence,” he wrote, “actually suggests directly that this cluster does not exist.”
When I asked Marrero about the autopsy results, he told me he was taken aback by the authority with which Jansen presented them. “Causality is not for the pathologist to establish,” he said. Marrero didn’t doubt that Jansen had found evidence of numerous diseases, but that didn’t exclude the possibility that those diseases might have been triggered by something in the environment. “People exposed to heavy metals sometimes develop Parkinsonism, sometimes develop cancer, sometimes develop severe neuropathy,” he explained. “But it’s still exposure to heavy metals.”
In the context of a cluster of atypical cases that had stumped some of the most experienced scientists in Canada, Marrero believed that Jansen had not only overstepped his bounds but had failed to address the situation’s most critical questions: “Why so many young? Why so many in one area? Why so many in one family?” Many of Marrero’s colleagues in the working group agreed. In a leaked email from last year, one of them referred to Jansen’s findings as a “‘loophole’ through which the politicians have eagerly leaped to conclude nothing coherent is going on.”
For patients and their advocates, the release of Jansen’s findings was a turning point. “That’s when we said, ‘Gloves are off,’” Jill Beatty told me. Ellis’s Facebook group became a clearinghouse for ideas about how to counter the official narrative. There was talk of the patients crowdfunding environmental testing themselves and of inviting Erin Brockovich to do an outside investigation. Ellis began appearing on podcasts and TV demanding that the federal experts be invited back to New Brunswick. Lanteigne and others filed so many freedom-of-information requests that Marrero says provincial officials contacted him wondering whether he had hired a private investigator.
But the patients’ efforts left them no closer to answering the questions fueling the controversy. Why had the province declined the help of the federal experts? And considering the ambiguity of the science, why weren’t they also testing for toxic substances? In lieu of satisfactory responses from officials, theories of all kinds began to circulate, from bureaucratic incompetence to conspiracies blaming the influence of malevolent corporate interests. Marrero’s position was perhaps the most popular. “I think that what created the scare was the word ‘environment,’” he told me last summer. He believes that in the spring of 2021, as a tangible plan for testing New Brunswick’s air, soil and water began to materialize, the province got cold feet. Forestry, tourism and seafood are among the region’s most prominent — and profitable — industries, all of which rely on a healthy environment to thrive. If testing revealed that New Brunswick’s environment was compromised, it could spell disaster for the provincial economy.
While Marrero’s theory was pure speculation, a number of experts involved in the working group also came to believe that political forces had eclipsed scientific ones. Citing concerns over how their statements might affect their access to public funding, these experts declined to speak on the record, but one sentiment appeared ubiquitous among the group: By limiting their investigation at the outset, provincial officials had squandered a rare opportunity for advancing the kind of broad scientific inquiry that a full-scale study offered. “We have an unbelievably capable set of tools to look at biological and epidemiological and environmental characteristics,” one senior scientist explained to a reporter from The Walrus, a Canadian magazine, shortly after the working group was sidelined. “It’s amazing, the potential that is not being tapped.”
Marrero felt as if he was in a bind. As the neurologist of record, he was still needed to provide consent forms to the oversight committee, and he encouraged patients to comply with the province’s inquiry. But he maintained his belief that the illness was triggered by something environmental — which he believes made him a target. In a letter to Dr. Jennifer Russell, the province’s chief medical officer of health, he complained that his efforts were “being sidelined with attempts to dismiss my concerns and my pleas and create hurdles.” During appointments, he started quieting patients with a finger before checking the hallway to see if someone from the hospital brass was listening in.
Over time, his nerves began to fray. During our conversation, he told me gravely about an incident a few years ago when he was followed by a man in a blue car as he drove from his home to a television interview in an industrial section of Moncton. At the studio building, he asked the show’s producer to come down; when she appeared, the other car sped away. “I could have an ‘accident,’” he said, “and no one’s going to know.”
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russell announced that the oversight committee had finished its work. The survey, she said, ‘‘could find no common exposure in the group.’’ It was the same conclusion that Jansen, the neuropathologist, reached after his autopsies. In short, the syndrome didn’t exist.
In their final report, provincial health officials explained what they believed had gone wrong. They argued that the case definition for the illness was overly broad, to the point that it overlapped with other conditions. Because of that, no human-tissue testing was needed. They also singled out Marrero for not seeking second opinions before referring patients to the cluster, an assertion he rejects. He notes that in 2021, the working group had offered second opinions in a number of cases, going so far as to remove a few from the cluster. Marrero says he also spent countless hours discussing the situation with Dr. Neil Cashman, one of Canada’s foremost neurologists, and Cashman later agreed to go to New Brunswick to meet with patients face to face before the province’s inward turn scuppered the plan.
In recently leaked emails, Marrero’s federal colleagues also appeared to reject the province’s findings. “It seems that the best interests of those affected have not been at the forefront of the actions taken,” wrote Dr. Samuel Weiss, a neuroscientist working for the federal agency that offered the $5 million to fund the investigation. “How this has and continues to be the case — is part of a larger mystery around the intentions of the Government’s focus on politics, power and process — over the humanity of care.” Dr. Michael Coulthart, head of the federal surveillance system for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, was even more direct.
“My scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in NB that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist,” he wrote in an email to colleagues. He, too, felt that the decline in Marrero’s patients was most likely caused by an environmental trigger. “I believe the truth will assert itself in time,” he concluded.
For the patients, the government’s report was a devastating blow. Before its release, they began receiving letters from provincial health officials detailing different diagnoses for their physicians to consider. Gabrielle Cormier was told she might be schizophrenic. Ellis was told that his father might have progressive supranuclear palsy. The committee hadn’t seen either patient in person; it based its second opinions on medical charts alone, a particularly challenging assignment considering the nuance involved in diagnosing neurological conditions. As it turned out, those two specific conditions had been ruled out by specialists before either Cormier or Ellis had been referred to Marrero. In fact, in Ellis’s case, it had been ruled out by one of the neurologists on the oversight committee itself.
Other cluster members were provided with possible diagnoses of cancer, alcohol-induced brain damage, H.I.V. and a broad range of dementias, all of which were dismissed by testing years earlier. The patients were now being told to return to the same doctors who had been so perplexed by their symptoms that they referred them to Marrero. The circular logic of it was particularly insulting because there was no other recourse. The final report had been issued. The case was closed.
“It just felt like the ultimate betrayal,” Ellis said. “My father has paid taxes his entire life in New Brunswick, is languishing in a care home, and no one federally or provincially is doing anything anymore to help him.”
The province has maintained that its investigation was scientifically sound and that the Public Health Agency of Canada supported the results, but implicit in its version of events was a sobering concession. According to provincial officials, the patients were suffering not from an unknown illness but from incurable diseases that are known all too well. And they were doing so at rates, especially among young people, that were shockingly high.
Last year, I met Marrero at a hotel in Moncton overlooking the Trans-Canada Highway. He was dressed in a finely tailored gray suit and introduced himself warmly. As we rode the elevator to my room, however, it became clear that his dark suspicions had yet to abate. Before our meeting, he refused to speak with me over his work phone and was hesitant to talk in the hotel conference room. He hadn’t spoken to the press in nearly 18 months. “If I was thinking strictly in terms of me as an individual and as a physician, it’s better I don’t talk,” he explained. His lawyer had advised against it. Marrero, however, felt dutybound. “I have to provide answers to people who are sick,” he said. “And to do everything I can do for them.”
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.
There had been clinical developments as well. 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.
On their own, the results mean little. Without a control group, it’s impossible to understand the results in context. Perhaps everyone in New Brunswick has elevated levels of glyphosate because of spraying in the province. The findings do, however, align with an increased push throughout Canada and the world to recognize the risks that chemicals like glyphosate pose to human health. 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 am not concluding that this is the cause of what is happening,” Marrero said. “But it is something that is telling me that something is wrong with the environment they live in.”
Marrero’s conviction notwithstanding, the fact remains that the situation in New Brunswick has raised far more questions than answers. Was the epidemiological study blocked by political or corporate interests, as Marrero told me he suspected? Or was he an overzealous physician who had rushed to stamp his name on a novel disease, as the province’s report implied? And of course the answer to the most fundamental question of all — what exactly is making New Brunswickers ill? — remains elusive.
What does seem clear, however, is that the collision of politics and science unfolding there is unlikely to remain exclusive to the province. As the evidence linking neurological disorders and environmental factors continues to grow, the way in which diseases manifest in the human body will undoubtedly be altered as well. It’s not difficult to imagine the next puzzling disease cluster right around the corner.
It’s a concern that keeps Marrero up at night. “This is a collective effort that is needed,” he said. “Not only for the people here in New Brunswick, but because whatever is causing this might be happening elsewhere.” He has already received referrals from a half-dozen other Canadian provinces. When I asked how he thought the situation would play out over the long term, he was uncertain. “I don’t pretend to have the answer,” he said. “I think science should be the answer.”
Brendan George Ko is a visual storyteller based in Toronto and Maui who works in photography, video, installation, text and sound. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Patel Brown gallery in Toronto.
Cases of Mysterious Brain Disorder Raise Environmental Toxin Concerns in Canada, Residents are reportedly seeing an increase in a dementia-like illness — but no one can explain why by Cara Lynn Shultz, August 20, 2024, People
Cases of an unexplained disorder that causes dementia-like symptoms are increasing in a Canadian province, leading many to worry that there is an environmental cause.
Called the New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown etiology, after the province where it’s found, the disorder is marked by “atypical, rapidly progressive dementia,” a government investigation found.
Early cases were diagnosed as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which the Mayo Clinic explains is similar to Alzheimer’s disease, but progresses more rapidly and leads to death.
However, as the family of Laurie Beatty, who died in 2018, told the New York Times, his test results for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease came back negative.
Beatty’s neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero, noted to the outlet that he’d seen an increase in patients with cognitive decline, saying their symptoms were first behavioral before devolving into muscle spasms, joint pain, and hallucinations that he says were “like a nightmare.”
However, the official investigation “did not identify any specific behaviours, foods, or environmental exposures that can be identified as potential risk factors” and instead of one specific illness, the patients studied were all dealing with known illnesses like schizophrenia or progressive supranuclear palsy.
Marrero told the New York Times that he’s now treating more than 430 patients with an undiagnosable cognitive decline, and that 111 of those patients are under age 45. As of the time of writing, 39 have died.
He also explained to the outlet that, when testing his patients’ blood for the presence of glyphosate — a weed-killing chemical that’s pervasive in the United States as well — 90% had elevated levels.
“I am not concluding that this is the cause of what is happening,” Marrero shared, per the NYT. “But it is something that is telling me that something is wrong with the environment they live in.”
He also highlighted that he has been getting referrals from other areas in Canada.
“This is a collective effort that is needed,” he told the publication. “Not only for the people here in New Brunswick, but because whatever is causing this might be happening elsewhere.”
Frightening theory about mystery wave of brain diseases terrorizing local community – leaving people paralyzed and unable to talk by MAIYA FOCHT, 14 August 2024, The Daily Mail
A mysterious wave of brain diseases has been sweeping across Canada, leaving locals with sudden memory loss, paralysis and seizures.
Since DailyMail.com last reported on the outbreak, hundreds more people claim to have been struck down by an unusual series of symptoms linked to the yet-unknown condition.
The case count now sits around 430 with 39 deaths and roughly a quarter of those are people under 45, according to Dr Alier Marrero, a neurologist who was one of the first physicians to draw attention to this issue.
The Canadian government has rejected the idea the cases are linked.
But Dr Marrero’s disagrees, and has performed his own tests, finding high levels of pesticides in patients’ blood.
His leading theory is that the mysterious decline is caused by something in the environment.
The case count is disputed. Dr Marrero said he’s seen around 430 patients that fall within the guidelines of the disease. In 2022, a government run investigation concluded there was no link between the 48 cases they included in their study.Provincial and federal gov’ts are fascist dishonest cowards, they serve themselves, their pensions (on our tax dollars) and corporations and the rich, not ordinary Canadians, our communities and environment. I do not trust anything gov’ts say about these cases because their masters are Irving Oil, Bayer-Monsanto and other multinationals benefiting from poisoning the earth for profit via Roundup. Our govts and regulators didn’t/don’t even have the cahones to hold AER/Encana-Ovintiv accountable for their crimes in covering up and engaging in fraud to assist illegal aquifer frac’er Encana, instead violated my rights even though there are thousands of pages of Encana, Alberta Environment and AER documents proving the law violations and community-wide drinking water contamination.
One theory is that local pesticide use, which are used to keep the area’s forests healthy,Shitting reporting. Glyphosate keeps nothing healthy, it’s a ruthless killer of vital decideous shrubs and trees and many other plants that aid in wildfire suppression; glyphosate is massively used by industry to fatten profits for the mega rich, nothing and no one else. could be a factor.
The other is that New Brunswick, a coastal town whose economy depends in part on fishing and aqua-tourism industries, may be consuming high amounts of sea life contaminated with a toxic algae.
Whatever has been causing it, locals are alarmed.
Around Christmas of 2018, Lauire Beatty, 81, a retired contractor from New Brunswick, became paranoid and unmoored in time.
He then developed seizures, jerks and twitches. Doctors initially thought he was suffering from a rare condition similar to mad cow, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
But they were wrong, what Mr Beatty had was nothing any doctor recognized. Within six months he was dead.
Mr Beatty was part of a growing number of Canadians from the province with similar symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose with any known neurological condition.
Other patients, like Gabrielle Cormier, 24, who was diagnosed at age 20, have experienced memory loss, vision problems and problems walking.
Cormier says she had a passion for figure skating since she was eight years old, adding ‘it was my life’. But the mysterious neurological illness rendered her unable to walk independently and she had to give up skating as well as her time at university
Others yet have dealt with a sudden onslaught of ‘nightmare’-like hallucinations, limb pain, spasms, cognitive decline and teeth chattering.
The wide range of symptoms experienced is just one of the reasons that has made this disease hard to study and categorize.
In fact, in February 2022 an investigation by the New Brunswick province concluded it couldn’t find a clear link between the cases, saying they ‘could find no common exposure in the group’.The NB gov’t at that time was lead by Irving Oil man, Blaine Higgs, nothing trustworthy about the guy or his gov’t. Let’s see if the new gov’t has the courage to do the right thing; I expect not and that Irving Oil still calls the shots.
This has led locals like the late Mr Beatty’s son, Tim, to question the motivation of the group.
‘We don’t have tinfoil hats,’ Tim Beatty said. ‘But if you are looking to breed a group of people to believe in a conspiracy theory, they have done a fantastic job.’
A year earlier, an emergency working group of federal scientists declared the cases related, giving the illness the name: ‘The New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown etiology.’
Government investigations into the disease, and what caused it, were launched in April 2021.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research pledged to donate $5million in funding to the investigation, which was slated to be led by the province ofIrving Oil New Brunswick.
Concerns were piqued about the investigation when the provincial Irving Oilworking group opted not to use the federal funding, the NYT reported.
Shortly after, a slate of meetings to discuss the investigation with experts and the public were cancelled.
‘There was a stop, suddenly, abruptly, with no apparent explanation,’ Dr Marrero said.
It was less surprising then when the provincial group made their February 2022 announcement, essentially dismissing the idea that the condition exists.
Their decision likely owed in part to a report from neuropathologist Dr Gerard Jansen, who performed autopsies on the eight patients who had died at the time and concluded they each died of a different illness.
Dr Jansen said his findings ‘actually suggests directly that this cluster does not exist.’
Dr Marrero disagreed with these findings, telling the NYT that people can be exposed to the same problem and develop different symptoms.
Leaked emails from Canadian health officials revealed he wasn’t alone.
Dr Marrero found elevated levels of glyphosate in roughly 90 percent of the patients he tested. He cautioned that until he compares this to other locals, it will be difficult to draw conclusions about what this means
Certain kinds of blue-green algae blooms produce BMAA, a neurotoxin that can cause dementia-like changes in the brain. At one point, Dr Coulthart suggested this could be contributing to the problem in New Brunswick
Dr Michael Coulthart, the head of a surveillance system for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which doctor’s initially thought might explain the cluster, told colleagues that something was happening in New Brunswick with these patients.
‘My scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in NB [New Brunswick] that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist,’ Dr Coulthart said in a leaked email.
‘It seems that the best interests of those affected have not been at the forefront of the actions taken,’ neuroscientist Dr Samuel Weiss of The Canadian Institutes of Health Research said in a different leak.
Dr Marrero extended his own investigations into the topic after the government announced its findings. In December 2022, he found that 90 percent of the patients he tested had elevated levels of an agricultural and heavily used in the forestry industry chemical called glyphosate in their blood.
He cautioned that this could merely be commonplace in the area, and it’s not possible to conclude anything from these blood tests alone.
Glyphosate is a herbicide, and the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, which has been scrutinized by the public for decades.
Some studies link it Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and others link it to an increased risk for developing Parkinson’s.
It’s banned or restricted in parts of Canada. In Quebec, the herbicide is banned in forest management. In Vancouver, there is a ban on using the produce in public parks and outdoor gardens.
But not all health organizations agree the product is toxic. The US EPA is not a health org, it’s a known liar and industry enabler with sometimes some protections thrown in to con the masses. Just wait until Trump2 finishes with it, I bet it’ll become no duty of care, washer of industry’s underware and cover-up agent extraordinaire like AER.
The US EPA has repeatedly affirmed its approval of glyphosate. The most recent review of the product in 2020 stated: ‘there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label.’
It’s still used across North America. In New Brunswick, it’s used to maintain destroy the forestsand turn them into one species fire traps.
Dr Coulthart has previously provided another theories that could explain the syndrome.
Certain kinds of algae, produces a toxin known as beta-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA). It’s produced in high amounts in algae blooms, and can accumulate through the food chain from water bugs to fish to humans.
BMAA has been linked to a host of unique dementia-like symptoms, and scientists suggest the neurotoxin causes proteins to get misfolded and damage the brain.
He’s not sure what has caused the situation in the area, but is somewhat certain that it has to do with the environment.
‘I don’t pretend to have the answer,’ he said. ‘I think science should be the answer.’
Spraying Glyphosate on our Forests – Stop the Spray! 4 Min. by Nerdy About Nature, Mar 29, 2022
Spring is a wonderful time where all sort of deciduous plants and trees start to wake up and sprout buds – but not it BC Timber Sales can help it! The government organization recently announced plans to spray a majority of the lower BC mainland from Hope to Squamish with chemical herbicides such as Glyphosate (AKA Roundup) as part of a 5 year “pest management plan”. The issue here is that ALL of the species identified and targeted as pests are all native species that play intricate roles within our forest ecosystems and this action would have profound effects on both our lands and our communities. Glyphosate is a known carcinogen to humans, and its use at this scale has profound impacts on our watersheds, wildlife, and Indigenous culture, yet…this is not new, and spraying of these chemicals on our forests has been happening for decades throughout Cascadia. It’s time that we stop the spray to ensure a healthy, vibrant future for us all. Take Action:
- Call Elijah Fraser at BC Timber Sales to demand a 60 days extension to the consultation period, 604-702-5700.
- Email BC Timber Sales at email hidden; JavaScript is required by EOD on March 27th for an extended consultation period on the issue.
- Follow @Stop.the.spray.bc for more resources on ending the spraying of Glyphosate on our forests here in BC. …
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Second Canadian scientist alleges brain illness investigation was shut down, Exclusive: Prof Samuel Weiss said in leaked email that government halted efforts to tackle mystery illness by Leyland Cecco and Campbell MacDiarmid, 21 Jun 2024, The Guardian
A senior Canadian federal scientist has alleged that the government shut down an investigation into a mystery brain illness in New Brunswick that he believes may have affected 350 people.
He is the second federal scientist to accuse the government of deliberately halting the investigation and to say that the caseload is higher than the government has acknowledged.
Health officials in the eastern province first said in 2021 that 40 people were suffering from an unexplained neurological condition. A year later, a committee assembled by the province determined that the patients probably had been misdiagnosed and were suffering from other diseases.
In a leaked email seen by the Guardian, Prof Samuel Weiss, a neuroscientist working for the Canadian federal agency responsible for funding medical research, wrote that the government had deliberately curtailed the search for an explanation.
This U of C event, notably the lecture by Dr. Weiss, is worth watching:
Lecture of a Lifetime 2022, titled Inspired Science: The Art of a Breakthrough – with Dr. Samuel Weiss 1 hour, 41 Min by U of C, May 11, 2022
“In the spring of 2021, I felt incredibly optimistic that an all of government effort to unravel the mystery was in the cards. However, in short order, the scientific effort was shut down at the request of the [federal and provincial] Governments,” Weiss wrote in the email sent in May.
“I don’t think it is helpful to suggest or point to who or why – suffice to say that we were prepared to marshal both financial and human scientific resources to tackle the mystery, but they were declined.”
It is not clear to whom the email was sent. It concluded with Weiss offering a heartfelt apology. “All I can offer is my sincere apologies for our poor response to the mystery illness – and my hope that you don’t suffer too much. You and the 350 others affected deserve so much more.”
Weiss is the scientific director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and a member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame for his research in neurogenesis, the process by which neurons are generated in the brain, which has pioneered avenues for treatment of several degenerative brain diseases including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.
Weiss, the New Brunswick health department and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) were contacted for comment.
After publication, a New Brunswick health department spokesperson said: “New Brunswick does not hinder any research into this area of study. If the department of health determines any additional actions are needed, it will respond accordingly.”
The spokesperson outlined how medical professionals in New Brunswick had a duty to notify authorities of certain diseases, and said the department was assisting Dr Alier Marrero, who initially raised concerns about patients he was following. “Public Health New Brunswick has had ongoing discussions with PHAC on this file and has worked in partnership with the national agency several times to support Dr Marrero,” the spokesperson said.
Public Health New Brunswick says on its website: “An oversight committee reviewing the case files of all 48 of the potential cases found that the patients didn’t have symptoms in common or have a shared common illness. It’s important to understand that outbreak investigations are not rare … Every cluster or outbreak with an unknown cause is considered a ‘mystery illness’ until an outbreak investigation can be done to find out why people are becoming ill.”
While the province’s investigative committee concluded there was no “cluster” of patients with a mystery illness, the leaked emails show that senior research scientists remain unconvinced.
The Guardian has reported previously that 1,000 pages of internal documents obtained by freedom of information requests showed that early on in the investigation the province’s department of environment and public health units began eagerly exploring the possibility of environmental causes alongside their federal counterparts. But by mid-2021, New Brunswick appeared to have halted the probe with little explanation.Irving Oil Pressures? Threats? Bribes?
This month, the Guardian reported that another leading federal scientist, Michael Coulthart, had alleged he had been barred from investigating the cluster of unexplained illnesses.
Coulthart, a microbiologist who heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, wrote in a leaked email that he believed 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 and Parkinson’s.
The revelations that top federal scientists believe the government has stonewalled an investigation has infuriated some of those affected and their families, who are demanding a response.It’s infuriating me too! For years. The suffering many are enduring is horrific and unforgivable.
“I really feel alarmed but not surprised at how the information is being dismissed. And I feel that there is a moral and ethical responsibility for other officials to step in,” said Stacie Quigley Cormier, whose 23-year-old daughter Gabrielle is suffering from a neurological disorder that has left her with muscle loss and shaking.
“I don’t feel like they’ve forgotten about us. I feel like they’ve intentionally pretended to forget about us and that there’s nothing to see here,” That’s what I think too she said in a phone interview, calling on the government to do more. “We need the scientists to be able to do some testing, we need access to other testing that maybe we don’t have in New Brunswick.”
After five years of searching for answers, Gabrielle’s condition is worse than ever, Cormier said. “There’s a decline in her health. She was shaking more, and she has neuropathy.”
Doctors have identified decreased functioning in Gabrielle’s frontal and temporal lobe, Cormier said, and diagnosed her with anti-MAG peripheral neuropathy, an extremely rare condition usually found in older men, in which a person’s immune system develops antibodies against a key protein in the nervous system.
The family believe that an unidentified external cause, such as a chemical in the environment, has caused the cluster of illnesses and say more must be done to identify it. “We know that so many people are sick. And we know that something is obviously causing this. As we get closer to putting some of these puzzle pieces together, they’re still pointing in the same direction,” Cormier said.
Another woman in New Brunswick who is suffering from the mystery illness was furious at the thought of the government not taking the situation seriously. She said her anger at the government’s response was adding to the difficulties she was experiencing as a result of the condition, including blurred vision, disturbed sleep, loss of appetite, muscle aches, stiffness, tremors and a loss of balance and coordination.
“I can’t multitask and get frustrated very easily, like I get mad over nothing for no reason and have no patience,” said the woman, who is in her 20s and asked to withhold her name to retain her medical privacy.
“It’s extremely frustrating that at the end of the day a bunch of politicians are trying to sweep it under a rug and they are leaving our doctors and scientists gagged and unable to do their jobs.”
More patients, few answers, While New Brunswick says there is no mystery brain disease afflicting dozens, neurologist Alier Marrero, who has treated most of the patients, is ‘sounding the alarm’ as more people report unexplained neurological symptoms by Wency Leung, Photography by Chris Donovan, July 21, 2023, The Globe and Mail
When the New Brunswick government raised alarms about a potential cluster of 48 cases of a new and unusual brain disease in 2021, a driving force behind the concern was Alier Marrero, a neurologist in the province, who had seen and treated most of the patients.
Last year, when the government announced that a provincial public health investigation had concluded there was no mystery disease, and that the affected patients were likely suffering from known illnesses that had been misdiagnosed, Dr. Marrero offered no public response. He had been sidelined from the investigation, and repeatedly referred interview requests to the Vitalité Health Network, his employer.
But now he is once again saying publicly what he had previously maintained: that, despite the provincial findings, there could be a common unknown cause behind his patients’ illnesses – likely, he says, an environmental contaminant. And he says the number of his patients experiencing unexplained rapid neurodegeneration has increased, and now totals more than 200.
“I am advocating and ringing the bell and sounding the alarm and calling for help on behalf of my patients – as a physician and as a human being – on behalf of their families and their communities who desperately need answers,” he said in a recent interview.
In the more than a year since the New Brunswick government concluded there is no unknown neurological syndrome, it has not addressed Dr. Marrero’s claims about new cases in detail. The Globe and Mail is not able to verify whether his patients are actually suffering from an unknown disease. Interview requests to several federal experts who were initially consulted or involved in a national-provincial effort to study the illnesses have been referred to the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), the Public Health Agency of Canada or New Brunswick health authorities, or have gone unanswered.
Last week, a group of four medical students and eight university professors – including Luc Tremblay, a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistryat the Université de Moncton, and Matthew Betti, an assistant professor at Mount Allison University who was involved in the National COVID-19 Modelling Task Force – issued an open letter asking for a new public health investigation into the illnesses.
The letter’s author, James Paddle, a medical student entering his second year at Université de Sherbrooke’s Centre de formation médical du Nouveau-Brunswick, said he wrote it after a recent two-week placement with Dr. Marrero, during which he said he saw 20 to 30 patients with atypical symptoms.
Among the new patients Dr. Marrero has seen since the province concluded its investigation is Sarah Nesbitt, who is 40 and lives in Moncton. Previously fit and active, Ms. Nesbitt said she started feeling ill in the summer of 2020 and has progressively gotten worse. Her symptoms include kidney damage, and episodes of disorientation, stuttering, and vomiting. She said she once burned herself on an open flame because she couldn’t control her hand.
“Basically, this has taken my entire life,” she said.
Visits to the hospital and her family doctor yielded no answers, other than that whatever was plaguing her appeared to be neurological. Ms. Nesbitt’s doctor referred her to Dr. Marrero, whom she has been seeing since March, 2022.
To Dr. Marrero, there are a few things that set all of these patients, including those identified in the initial cluster, apart from typical cases of known diseases, like Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson’s disease.
In addition to being relatively young, many are clustered within certain geographic areas. While Dr. Marrero emphasized that he is not an epidemiologist, he said they appear to be concentrated in a few key locations, including the Acadian Peninsula, the Restigouche area, and rural areas in the vicinity of Moncton, extending southeast to Sackville.
He also finds the speed of his patients’ disease progression unusual. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, tends to develop over many years. By comparison, some of his patients experience initial episodes of rapid decline. Some have died within a few months or weeks of showing symptoms. (Dr. Marrero declined to say how many patients have died in total, but said he has reported each one of them to Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System.)
Their illnesses seem to evolve, affecting first the spinal cord, working up to the brain stem and then toward the frontal lobes, which are responsible for executive function, he said.
At a news conference in March, a group of his patients called for further investigation into whether environmental toxins are the cause of their illnesses.
Julie Hardy, 52, who began seeing Dr. Marrero in June, 2021, said not having an explanation for her illness is “terrifying.”
Ms. Hardy said she started having trouble with her balance around 2017. She now also suffers from blurred vision, poor memory and lack of strength, with her left side weaker than her right. She doesn’t have full control of her left hand. She also has trouble breathing, and her family doctor is trying to determine whether this is related to her brain function.
Ms. Hardy, who used to be a cook at a daycare, has been unable to work since 2021 because, she said, it was too dangerous to continue. She would forget things on the stove, and could lose her balance or fall over when bending down to pick up a child.
“It’s just frustrating, and nobody in the government seems to listen, to care,”If you are a law violating polluting corporation, Canadian politicos are all ears and open cheque books with our money: “How many billions do you need this time?” she said.
Jillian Lucas, 37, said she was already dealing with post-concussion syndrome after suffering a head injury around 2018. Her stepfather was also experiencing neurological symptoms at the time. Ms. Lucas began developing symptoms similar to his after moving in with him and her mother in 2019.
Ms. Lucas’s stepfather had started seeing Dr. Marrero in October of that year, and she started seeing him, too, in the spring of 2021. Both she and her stepfather have insomnia, trouble balancing, memory problems, frequent nightmares, tremors and weakness. In spite of countless tests conducted or ordered by Dr. Marrero, she still doesn’t know the cause.
“One of the hardest things is not knowing, because I don’t have a road map,” Ms. Lucas said. “I wake up every day wondering if I’m going to lose another piece of myself.”
In e-mails to The Globe, New Brunswick’s Department of Health Irving Oil & Monsanto/Bayerrepeated that the province’s investigation had found no evidence of an unknown neurological syndrome, and that the Public Health Agency of CanadaIrving Oil & Monsanto/Bayerhad supported this conclusion. It confirmed it had received correspondence from Dr. Marrero about the growing number of cases he is seeing. The department said it has been in contact with him and the Public Health Agency of CanadaIrving Oil & Monsanto/Bayer, and would respond accordingly if it determines any other action is needed.
While the health department noted that Dr. Marrero’s correspondence said he knew of at least 147 cases, the department said it had received detailed reports for only 14 of them since January, which it said are being reviewed. The department said it had reminded Dr. Marrero in March that he is legally required to submit details of new cases within seven days of identifying them.
Dr. Marrero said keeping up with the paperwork the health department requires – in addition to caring for patients and trying to find out what’s wrong with them – is more than he can handle on his own.
When Dr. Marrero first encountered an unusual neurological case around 2010, he said, he wasn’t alarmed, because rare diseases do exist. But he started noticing an uptick in atypical cases around 2017. By the spring of 2021, he was meeting with national and provincial experts to discuss these cases as many as five to 10 times a week.
During a news conference in March, 2021, New Brunswick’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Jennifer Russell, told reporters that these patients were likely suffering from a new disease.
“We haven’t seen this anywhere else. And so it is of unknown etiology,” she said, adding that the symptoms were similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare brain disease caused by abnormal, toxic prion proteins.
The province funded the creation of the MIND Clinic, a specialized clinic at Horizon Health Network’s Moncton Hospital, in April, 2021. There, Dr. Marrero provided care for patients who appeared to have the mysterious disease.
In the spring of 2021, several scientists, including Michael Strong, president of the CIHR and an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, told The Globe they expected an investigation would be complex and lengthy.
“If the worst-case scenario is that this is something new that we haven’t seen before, then truly bringing the whole-of-the-government response that’s working on this now, and bringing the academic community to bear on this … it’s what we’ve got to do,” Dr. Strong said at the time.
During Dr. Marrero’s meetings with federal and provincial expertsin 2021, one of the leading hypotheses that emerged, he explained, was that the cases were caused by some kind of environmental exposure, such as to a toxin called beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA.
BMAA, which is produced by cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, has been hypothesized to have been the cause of a cluster of neurological diseases on the Pacific island of Guam at the end of World War II. A major cyanobacteria bloom occurred in 2017 at the Tower Road reservoir, which supplies water to the Moncton area.
Over the course of these meetings, Dr. Marrero said, he was asked to seek consent from the families of patients who had died to collect tissue samples of the patients’ fat, liver, kidneys and brains, to test for toxicity.
Susan Murch, a chemistry professor at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan who studies BMAA, confirmed that she and the Public Health Agency of Canada had discussed testing these tissues.
David Coulombe, a CIHR spokesperson, said his agency offered its support for the investigation by proposing to make use of a fund it keeps for research responses to emerging health threats.
The amount of funding was never settled, Mr. Coulombe said. And the testing of the tissues for BMAA was never done. Instead, Public Health New Brunswick released its final report in February, 2022, after a months-long investigation into what it called “a potential neurological syndrome of unknown cause.”
The public health agency had conducted a surveillance questionnaire that asked patients about their demographics, personal histories, activities and potential food and environmental exposures. And it had assembled an independent oversight committee, which included six neurologists. After analyzing the results of the questionnaire and the committee’s report, the agency concluded that the 48 patients who were considered a potential cluster, or group with similar characteristics, were not actually suffering from a common unknown illness.
The oversight committee reviewed patients’ medical files and found that they likely had known diseases that had simply been misdiagnosed. Some patients and their families have challenged this finding, saying they were never examined by committee members and that the diagnoses proposed by the oversight committee were for illnesses – including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia – that didn’t fit their circumstances or had already been ruled out through tests.
Public Health New Brunswick’s final report also emphasized that 46 of the 48 cases were referred by a single neurologist. Though it did not mention him by name, this neurologist was Dr. Marrero. “Unfortunately, many of the theories which caught people’s attention were based on speculation, uncorroborated opinions and in the absence of a thorough analysis of epidemiological and clinical information,” the report said.
Last summer, Dr. Marrero was informed that he would no longer be working at the MIND Clinic. Since July, 2022, he has been seeing patients at his primary practice, at Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre, in Moncton.
Asked why Dr. Marrero was replaced at the MIND Clinic, Jody Enright, medical director for the Moncton-area Horizon Health Network, did not answer directly. She said in an e-mail only that Dr. Marrero had returned to his primary practice.
When Horizon informed Dr. Marrero’s patients that he would no longer be working at the MIND Clinic, it offered them two options: they could continue to be seen by him, or be seen by a new neurologist at the MIND Clinic, where their care would also be supported by an interdisciplinary team, including nurses, a social worker, a neuropsychologist and health professionals in psychiatry, speech language pathology, physiotherapy and occupational therapy.
Many patients opted to stay with Dr. Marrero, and they lost access to those other services. In her e-mailed statement, Dr. Enright did not answer a question about why this had occurred. She said that while she could not comment on specific cases, in general those who decided to stay with the MIND Clinic have received second opinions, diagnoses and continuing interdisciplinary care and follow-up.
Dr. Marrero disputes any suggestion that he was a lone doctor crying wolf. In most cases, he said, he has not been the only doctor, nor the only neurologist, who has seen these patients. Several of his patients and their family members confirmed this to The Globe.
Luc LeBlanc, 43, a patient of Dr. Marrero’s who was in the initial cluster, said he thought he had finally found an explanation for his illness when he sought a second opinion from a neurologist in Toronto. The visit was facilitated by CBC’s The Fifth Estate in November, 2021. That neurologist told him she could only speak to his case, but that she believed his symptoms – which include memory loss, trouble with balance and coordination, and a persistent burning sensation in his skin – were not an unknown neurological syndrome. Rather, she told him, they were attributable to a serious car accident in 2018, and to stress.FFS!!!!
“I took that as a win, and tried to move on,” Mr. LeBlanc said.
But his health has worsened. Mr. LeBlanc said muscles throughout his body have atrophied, and that his family doctor has expressed concern about his dramatic loss of body mass. He has experienced breathing problems and hearing loss. He said he is still seeing Dr. Marrero, though not regularly, and that he remains in contact with the Toronto neurologist, with whom he has discussed the possibility of being referred to another neurologist in New Brunswick, or returning to Toronto for another evaluation.
“I kind of feel bad, because New Brunswick is really saying, ‘You’re sick. We don’t care. Try to find some help elsewhere,’” he said. “It’s a bad approach.”
Dr. Murch, the University of British Columbia BMAA expert, said further investigation is needed. She emphasized that her lab is for research, and not a clinical lab intended for diagnostic tests. She added that she had been waiting for ethics approval to test patients’ tissue samples when a decision was made not to send the samples to her. She thinks these tests should still be done.
“I do think more testing is needed, whether it’s done in my lab or whether it’s done in another lab,” she said. But, she added: “We need to look at the whole food web, and just testing the patients is not enough.”
She explained that diagnosing a neurological disease is difficult, and that sometimes the pathology – the way cells, tissues and organs respond to illness and injury – can be misleading. For example, a patient can have mixed pathologies, with symptoms of several diseases. “So the New Brunswick conclusion that these were all patients who had some other illnesses is based on incomplete information,” she said.
Mr. Coulombe, the CIHR spokesperson, said his agency was informed by Public Health New Brunswick in May, 2021 that its help would not be needed. He said CIHR remains ready to provide research support and advice if its assistance is requested by those leading the investigation in New Brunswick.
The Public Health Agency of Canada also said that, while it is available to support provinces and territories, the government of New Brunswick is the lead authority on this issue.
Back in New Brunswick, Dr. Marrero said he is appealing for federal and provincial help. As he awaits it, he said, he is still trying to find answers.
Timeline
2017
Dr. Marrero says he has noticed a jump in unusual cases, which are initially believed to be Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) or a similar disease.
February, 2020
Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Surveillance System (CJDSS), Public Health New Brunswick and regional health authorities meet to discuss the number of CJD cases observed in the province.
March, 2020
The World Health Organization declares a novel coronavirus pandemic.
September 2020
According to Public Health New Brunswick, 29 cases of atypical, rapidly progressive dementia, including several cases of CJD, are discussed at a meeting with CJDSS and Dr. Marrero.
December 2020
The cases in question are not considered CJD, and are thought to be a cluster of a neurological syndrome of unknown cause. Public Health New Brunswick says there are 33 cases.
February 2021
A multidisciplinary team of provincial and national partners is created. Public Health New Brunswick says it is taking the lead on the investigation.
March 2021
CBC News and Radio-Canada report that a memo from the office of the province’s chief medical officer has been sent to health professionals, notifying them of the existence of a cluster of unusual neurological cases.
April 2021
Public Health New Brunswick says the cluster is closed at 48 cases. The MIND Clinic, a specialized clinic for these patients, is created with funding from the province’s Department of Health.
May 2021
Meetings of national and provincial experts come to a halt. Public Health New Brunswick says it is pausing recurring meetings with federal and provincial experts, and has asked CIHR to pause its main activities related to the file.
October 2021
Dorothy Shephard, the province’s health minister at the time, tells a news conference that an epidemiological study has found no evidence of a common exposure that could have triggered a potentially new neurological syndrome. She says provincial health officials believe many of the cases were misdiagnosed by a single neurologist.
February 2022
Public Health New Brunswick releases its final report, concluding there is no neurological syndrome of unknown cause. Dr. Marrero sends a letter to federal and provincial authorities, saying he has received more than 100 new requests to see patients with atypical progressive neurological symptoms.
July 2022
Dr. Marrero is replaced at the MIND Clinic. His patients are given a choice to either stay with him, or be seen by a new neurologist at the MIND Clinic, where they will have access to other health services.
January 2023
Dr. Marrero sends another letter to federal and provincial authorities, asking for help.
March 2023
A group of patients holds a news conference, calling on the New Brunswick government to allow the Public Health Agency of Canada to investigate whether environmental toxins are the cause of their illnesses. In response, the New Brunswick Department of Health says the Public Health Agency of Canada supported the results of the province’s investigation, which found no evidence of a common cluster. It says it will ask for more information about each of the additional cases.
July 2023
New Brunswick’s Department of Health confirms it has received Dr. Marrero’s correspondence. It says while he suggested he knew of 147 unusual cases, it has received only 14 detailed reports
A few of the Comments:
Lisa Barry:
What a disgrace. Clearly something is going on here. So what now? Wait until many many more people are ill?
app_7893326:
… If it is environment they had better go and talk to Mr Irving who owns New Brunswick who could have won the Canadian polluter of the year award for the last 50 years without breaking into a sweat.
Lisa Barry replying to above:
Oh the Irving’s. If you. look closely at the photo with the “Welcome to New Brunswick” sign there is an Irving logo in the lower right corner. I guess they own NB. 🙁
bai0tzov:
Some people suggest that this may be effects of glyphosate exposure.
Wooder138:
… $5 million was turned down by the Government of NB to investigate environmental causes. This is a very serious, complicated issue with many strange aspects. Many patients have high levels of Glyphosate and other herbicides/pesticides in their systems. There is a great deal of information that has been uncovered and people should research it carefully for the correct information.
Commentary:
This political maneuvering stinks to the high heavens. I can guarantee that if one of their family /children had this type of illness they would gain great access to testing. The fact the government has done very little other than stifling the original neurologist is enough reason to be highly suspicious of what they are fearing will be found out.
I feel for the individuals and families who are left helpless in this situation with no reasonable response/assistance.
Sageantoine:
A real public inquiry is necessary. Algal blooms are more common now due .to us cooking ourselves. We should also take a cue from the rapid declines of pollinators and other insects and animals. What are we if not amimals too? There was a recent article in Reader’s Digest about the increasing incidence of Parkinson’s and diseases with Parkinson’s like symptoms across North America. So this is not an isolated occurrence. But the government won’t want an inquiry since it’s donors profits are implicated.
TrickyRoger:
It’s the Pesticides that J.D. Irving Lumber is spraying all over the province, obviously.
NanDav to above:
That is one reasonable source for investigation – but the Irvings are very powerful and could potentially be successful in blocking it.
New Brunswick’s Mystery Disease: Why Did the Province Shut Out Federal Experts? The provincial government’s closed-door investigation has confused experts, stoked fears, and missed an opportunity to solve a possible new brain disorder by Matthew Halliday, Updated Dec. 14, 2022, Published Oct. 22, 2021, The Walrus
Gabrielle Cormier’s Neurological Illness Emerges
In January 2020, Alier Marrero, a neurologist in Moncton, New Brunswick, began examining a patient he’d been referred—an eighteen-year-old woman named Gabrielle Cormier from Dalhousie Junction, a small town in the province’s far north.
Her case was bewildering: as a high school student, she started to have difficulty reading, especially on computer screens, where letters appeared hazy and indistinct. By grade twelve, in 2019, her concentration flagged and she was losing strength in her lower body. A few months before graduating, she collapsed at school. An ER doctor chalked it up to a panic attack, but within weeks, she had developed tingling sensations in her legs; over the summer, they turned a sickly grey. In the fall, while studying biology at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University, Cormier felt her disorientation and mental fog worsening, and her exhaustion grew debilitating.
That winter, Marrero performed a gauntlet of exams: cognition tests, memory tests, blood tests, and scans including EEG, MRI, VEP, and SPECT (a nuclear-imaging test in which a radioactive tracer is injected into the bloodstream). By then, Cormier was having difficulty walking and her vision problems had turned hallucinatory—a fluctuating field across her line of sight that she compares to TV static.
On Valentine’s Day 2020, Cormier underwent a spinal tap for signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a fatal, swiftly developing disorder caused when brain proteins called prions misfold into an abnormal form. Cormier’s spinal fluid came back clean for CJD, however, as did the other tests, with two exceptions: an EEG showing diminished electrical activity in the brain and a SPECT showing reduced cerebral blood flow. Both suggested neurological impairment, but neither pointed, by itself, to any known illness.
Symptoms
Baffling as it was, Cormier’s condition was familiar to Marrero. A Cuban-born neurologist, he had worked in Moncton since 2012 and, in recent years, had seen more and more patients—often unusually young, equally men and women—displaying bizarre signs of neurological decline.
In many cases, the symptoms developed with excruciating speed but began almost inconspicuously with behavioural changes, sleep disturbances, or inexplicable pain. Then came memory difficulties, muscle wasting, and difficulty balancing. Many patients experienced visual hallucinations—some relatively benign (Cormier’s TV static), others unsettling (looming shadows), some nightmarish. There were auditory hallucinations: music, breaking objects, distant voices. Eventually, dementia appeared; even some youthful patients experienced a state akin to late-stage Alzheimer’s. Some developed Capgras delusion, the belief that loved ones have been replaced by impostors. The only universal symptom was myoclonus: chronic muscle spasms so severe that spouses often couldn’t share a bed. Some patients eventually progressed to akinetic mutism: they were unable to speak or move but still experienced spasms.
The symptoms, terrifying and incapacitating, appeared to be expressions of a sickness with no name and no known provenance. “It is literally something heartbreaking,” Marrero says, “because you need to provide answers, and every time you go back, it’s ‘Okay, you don’t have multiple sclerosis, you don’t have Parkinson’s disease, you don’t respond to therapy.’”
Because they ticked so many boxes associated with CJD, each case was reported to the Ottawa-based Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System. The CJDSS was set up, in 1998, by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) in the aftermath of the UK’s outbreak of “variant” CJD—more commonly known as mad cow disease—caused by prion-tainted beef, which ultimately killed at least 178 people.
Most CJD, however, is of the so-called sporadic variety, in which prions misfold without warning in otherwise healthy individuals. It is incredibly rare, striking about one or two people per million. (Canada saw sixty-five CJD cases last year, a typical annual number.) The volume of referrals coming from a province as small as New Brunswick was surprising and led to a deeper look. Some patients did turn out to have CJD, and several more received diagnoses of other established brain conditions. But the majority, totalling forty cases mostly between 2017 and early 2021, stumped Marrero and his federal colleagues, some of the country’s leading experts on neurodegenerative diseases. In the twenty-year history of the CJDSS, such a large group of patients in one small area—afflicted with a CJD-like disorder seemingly impervious to diagnosis—was unprecedented. According to one senior scientist in the federal public health infrastructure,
“Nothing like this phenomenon has ever been seen before.”
In late 2019 and early 2020, as Marrero was working with Cormier and other patients, he and PHAC scientists came to believe that they may be looking at a distinct, previously undescribed neurological disease. They took the extraordinary step of grouping the undiagnosed cases together as the Cluster of Progressive Neurological Symptoms of Unknown Etiology in New Brunswick. On March 5, the province’s deputy chief medical officer of health sent a memo to provincial physicians, urging them to watch for symptoms.
The cluster came to public attention that month, when the CBC reported on the memo. On March 18, New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health, Jennifer Russell, told reporters it was too early to venture a cause. With nowhere certain to settle, speculation found any perch: seafood contamination, old mine operations, well water, wild game, industrial herbicides, even pollution from a shuttered lead smelter in northern New Brunswick. By this time, the case count had risen to forty-three—eight in and around Moncton and thirty-five on the Acadian Peninsula, a rural francophone region of fewer than 60,000 people in the province’s northeast, which appeared to be the cluster’s hub.
In April, Michael Strong, a neuropathologist and the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), told the Globe and Mail that the medical mystery demanded “boots on the ground”—epidemiological investigators conducting in-person field research. And, later that spring, a concerted response started to coalesce.
As with most matters related to health, outbreak response in Canada falls under provincial jurisdiction, but in this case, New Brunswick asked the PHAC for help. Federal colleagues began assembling a nationwide working group, which eventually numbered about two dozen. It included Michael Coulthart, head of the CJDSS, as well as Neil Cashman, a University of British Columbia neurologist, and Strong. Across the country, consultations began with experts in prion disease, environmental neurotoxins, and food- and water-borne illness. According to documents obtained by a freedom of information request, the CIHR and the PHAC were meeting weekly, and a clinic was being put together in Moncton as a clearing house for patients, which would be partly headed by Marrero. By then, a posting on the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases—a global outbreak-monitoring system that publicized the first cases of SARS and Ebola—had brought the illness to global attention. Experts from Johns Hopkins University, the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Clinic reached out. As rapidly as the cluster had appeared, so did the expertise to combat it.
Then, on June 3, New Brunswick abruptly changed tack.Ordered by Irving Oil or Bayer-Monsanto? The province told the emerging national working group to stand down. The investigation “was pulled up to the highest levels of the New Brunswick government, and they took control,” says the senior scientist, who is intimately familiar with the workings of the PHAC investigation and has asked for anonymity, claiming federal scientists have been “muzzled” by federal health authorities at the request of the province. Cashman declined to speak for this story, indicating that he needed clearance from the New Brunswick government. Strong was permitted by the CIHR to speak only if the conversation avoided New Brunswick and instead focused on cluster epidemiology in general.
The New Brunswick government didn’t announce its suspension of the federal collaboration at the time. Instead, what the province has done is create its own oversight committee composed of six provincially appointed neurologists, none of whom appear to possess epidemiological experience in neuropathology—skills essential for investigating a cluster of this complexity. The committee mandate, according to a June 3 news release, is to “provide second opinions” on the files of affected patients in order to “ensure due diligence and rule out other potential causes.”
New Brunswick has a long history of withholding information from its citizens.How many tonnes of glyphosate has Irving Oil sprayed on New Brunswickers and their province?
In other words, rather than collaborating with the country’s top experts in a methodical, robustly funded investigation aimed at digging into potential causes, the province has put its modest resources toward relitigating the question already addressed by PHAC scientists: whether this is a true disease cluster, linked by a common cause. Since June, a pall of secrecy has descended over the committee’s work, and federal collaborators have been left largely in the dark. Right before the province unilaterally suspended its relationship with the PHAC, forty-eight cases were being investigated with thirty-nine confirmed—six of which had proven fatal. As of this writing, the provincial government hasn’t issued any updates on current patients or provided information about additional cases under investigation. (I made multiple requests to speak to the province’s chief medical officer of health as well as its health minister. Neither was made available.)
This isn’t necessarily unexpected. New Brunswick’s provincial elite, in both government and business, has a long history of withholding information from its citizens. But some of the highly regarded epidemiologists and neurologists I spoke to for this story agree that, whatever the province’s motivation, the cluster isn’t being tackled with the urgency it deserves. “We have an unbelievably capable set of tools to look at biological and epidemiological and environmental characteristics,” says the senior scientist of the expertise being inexplicably sidelined. “It’s amazing, the potential that is not being tapped.” By spurning that help, New Brunswick appears to be abdicating its responsibility to the sick, to the public, and to medical science itself.
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Similar Cases
Neurologists and epidemiologists have long flocked to unusual disease clusters, drawn by the prospect of discoveries that can shed light on afflictions affecting millions of people, such as Alzheimer’s or ALS. We know the devastating effects of these illnesses on the brain. But, as common as they are, they remain largely mysterious: we don’t know why they develop or how to prevent or reverse their course. “Hyperendemic foci,” as these clusters are called, promise something like real-world laboratories stocked with natural controls: a lot of sick people living in a similar environment, eating similar food, often with similar genetic backgrounds. Researchers hope to find causal patterns that may otherwise elude them.
For neurologists, the granddaddy of all hyperendemic foci—the most researched and among the longest lasting—occurred on Guam. Since at least the early twentieth century and probably long before, the Indigenous Chamorro people of the western Pacific island had been stricken, at extraordinarily high rates, by a neurodegenerative disease called lytico-bodig. (At one point, it accounted for 10 percent of adult deaths.) The mystery of lytico-bodig has never been solved, but other clusters have been cracked. In the 1960s, when American researcher Carleton Gajdusek went chasing reports of a fatal neurological illness among Papua New Guinea’s Fore people, he found a disease very much like CJD, called Kuru. It turned out to be transmitted by funerary cannibalism: rites of mourning that involve consuming the dead.
Some clusters have persisted for centuries, such as Muro disease, an ALS-like condition afflicting residents of Japan’s Kii Peninsula. Others are shorter lived, such as an outbreak of Progressive Supranuclear Palsy in northern France in the early 2000s, which was suspected to be linked to heavy-metal contamination. But most, even those that remain mysteries, have at least led to new knowledge and hypotheses about the function and dysfunction of our most complex, least understood organ—especially with regards to how the brain responds to environmental factors.
That potential is also present, says Marrero, in New Brunswick. “We might actually have the possibility in Canada, with all our experts contributing, to better understand other conditions.” Critical to developing that understanding, says Ralph Garruto, a former researcher with the US National Institutes of Health, is “shoe-leather epidemiology,” in which investigators spend time in communities, gathering detailed information through careful exploratory work with patients. Garruto himself has spent years in the field, examining disease clusters in the US, Ukraine, and the western Pacific—including Guam. There, he says, community engagement led to discoveries that would have been impossible remotely. A casual conversation uncovered new leads, someone’s stray limp became a diagnosed case, and so on. “You have to be on the ground to assess what’s happening,” says Garruto. “You have to move from one area to another, talk to people extensively and ferret out any cases which may not come to clinical attention.”
New Brunswick, by contrast, is conducting its investigation behind closed doors, at a remove from the patients it’s trying to better understand, and at what might be called a leisurely pace. According to Édouard Hendriks, one of the original two co-chairs of the provincial oversight committee, members are putting in “a few hours per week.” (Hendriks retired in August.)
The purpose of the internal review is to test for what scientists call a null hypothesis: the possibility that the PHAC’s experts mistook dozens of difficult-to-diagnose cases as representing a pattern that doesn’t exist—the possibility that each case is a one-off. The committee, says Hendriks, is focusing on reviewing the cases with an open mind. “Perhaps what we think is unknown at this point in time, in six months, one year, depending on the evolution of the patient, we’ll be able to see this is purely Alzheimer’s, this is purely this or that, and so forth.”
It’s true that medical history is littered with unexplained disease clusters that turn out to be statistical blips mistakenly identified by overzealous investigators. But others have entered the annals of medical lore and literature. Experts I’ve spoken to believe that what is happening in the province is too big to be explained away as a statistical illusion—that the existing data simply doesn’t lend itself to misreading. One example is the number of cases contrasted with total population. The Acadian Peninsula has seen at least thirty-five cases. That’s an extremely high prevalence for an undiagnosable neurodegenerative condition. That the syndrome is affecting people in their twenties and thirties is another factor, argues Marrero, resembling clusters like those in Papua New Guinea or Guam.
One important part of the investigation is in place: a questionnaire, which the PHAC helped design before it was cut off. It focuses on patients’ environments, job histories, travel habits, diets, etc. It was meant as a starting point, establishing common links between those affected—but, the senior scientist cautions, it’s “not highly sophisticated.”
It not only appears to be behind schedule but is being conducted in secret, with some family members required to sign non-disclosure agreements before participating.
It’s also being carried out by telephone rather than in person. Garruto calls that an amateur mistake, suggesting a “low-budget situation.” (According to Hendriks, COVID-19 protocols haven’t been a factor in limiting the investigation.)
“You cannot solve this with questionnaires,” says Hermann Schaetzl, a Calgary-based expert in animal prion diseases who was consulted last year by the PHAC on the then burgeoning investigation. Months ago, he anticipated a research call centred on New Brunswick, bringing together experts in multiple fields. No such thing emerged.
Another aspect of fieldwork not underway is environmental testing for neurotoxins in food, water, and soil. “If we’re going to do assays on the food web,” says Susan Murch, a professor of chemistry at the University of British Columbia, “then we need to do it before people get sick, not after.”
Murch was contacted by federal authorities this spring as a possible participant in the investigation. Her expertise lies in certain amino acids that are theorized to kick-start neurodegeneration. She was instrumental in suggesting a possible link between lytico-bodig (the Guam disease) and an amino acid called BMAA, which is present in the seeds of the island’s cycad trees. BMAA can also accumulate in seafood and develops in the kind of blue-green algae blooms that are increasingly common in New Brunswick’s lakes and rivers. (It’s been tentatively linked to elevated levels of ALS in the United States.) Murch’s lab at UBC’s Okanagan campus is the only one in the country capable of testing for BMAA in human tissues. Initial discussion with the PHAC fell silent, however, after New Brunswick asked its federal counterparts to stand aside.
Maybe the most crucial aspect of this kind of investigation, according to experts, is open communication.
This is a cornerstone of the approach recommended by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its step-by-step guide to outbreak investigations, which advocates transparency with media and regular information sharing with colleagues and the public on ongoing cases. This, too, is not happening. The province may even have fallen silent on news of additional deaths. On May 8, seventy-seven-year-old Sylvia Curtis—who, according to her daughter, was a confirmed case under Marrero’s care—died after a swift three-month decline. If the syndrome is responsible, she would be the seventh death. The official number, however, still stands at six.
The total case number has also stalled, at forty-eight, though this, too, may change. “I’ve been required by public health not to update anything until we finish this initial investigation, because we have not diagnosed everybody yet,” Marrero told me.
But, “in the clinic right now, we have over 100 patients in different stages of investigation.”
In the absence of information, rumours and anger have spread. Steve Ellis has had a front-row seat to much of it. On a Sunday night in June 2019, his sixty-one-year-old father, Roger, collapsed with a seizure. Roger spent the next six weeks in hospital. Within the first week, his muscles began to atrophy, his personality turned inexplicably aggressive, his balance faltered, and his memory became hazy. As with Cormier, Roger’s CJD test came back negative, and he was then transferred to Moncton’s Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre. Test after test turned up nothing. By the end of September, he had lost sixty pounds and descended into a dense cognitive fog. Roger’s decline was a rapid, catastrophic cascade from health to infirmity in less than four months. In June 2020, his case was counted as part of the New Brunswick cluster, and today he lives in long-term care.
As his father has deteriorated, thirty-nine-year-old Ellis has become an advocate for patients and families living with the condition. Last March, when the cluster was publicly announced, he made a Facebook page, hoping to find other affected families. It’s since become a beacon for connection and commiseration—as well as grievance, frustration, and a fair amount of speculation.
Ellis tries to keep the page out of tinfoil-hat territory. (Everything from vaccines to electromagnetic radiation has cropped up.) But he empathizes with the urge to find answers, particularly as his father’s health worsens and his frequent missives to government, when acknowledged at all, yield vague responses.
“The less the government says and the longer it goes on,” he says, “the more it looks like they’re hiding something.”
Lest that sound like conspiracy mongering, note that New Brunswick has long exhibited a penchant for paternalism and secrecy on matters of public health, and there’s no shortage of high-profile examples. For years, Parlee Beach—a bustling summertime attraction near the tourist town of Shediac—was plagued by sewage dumping and high E. coli counts. The province eventually devised a unique water-testing system that undercounted fecal contamination.Sounds like how Alberta tests! A 2017 CBC investigation revealed that the system was largely intended to ensure that the beach, and the Shediac-area economy, remained open and humming. In 2019, a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Moncton sickened sixteen people and killed one. For sixteen months, health authorities refused to disclose its source, until another CBC investigation traced the outbreak to bacteria in a cooling tower at a cannabis plant owned by Organigram—a company that has received substantial government funding and supplies the government-owned Cannabis NB.
Maybe the most notorious recent example is the firing of the province’s chief medical officer of health, Eilish Cleary, in 2015. At the time, Cleary was researching the human-health effects of glyphosate, a powerful herbicide (and potential carcinogen, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer) used in abundance by NB Power and J.D. Irving, the forestry arm of the wealthy Irving family business. No reason was given for Cleary’s firing, but environmental advocates and opposition politicians have suggested corporate interference. In 2016, Cleary received a $720,000 severance package in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement.Eight years later, Dr. Cleary died of cancer, aged 60. Speaking to the CBC in 2017, Mario Levesque, a political science professor at Mount Allison University, called the payment “hush money.”
Kat Lanteigne, executive director of BloodWatch, a Toronto-based group that advocates for a safe blood-donation system in Canada, is concerned that a large pool of possibly contaminated people in an area will lessen the number of healthy donors available to give blood. She’s also from the Acadian Peninsula and suspects that the province’s ousting of national collaborators is in keeping with a longer tradition of shutting down chatter that could be politically or economically damaging.
“I think what this points to is that classic nannyism of the government,” she says, “putting profit and industry before public safety.”
New Brunswick’s northeast, in particular, where the majority of cases have been identified, is already struggling economically. Dark whispers about local food, water, or industry are not in anyone’s financial interest. But that’s the very reason we have a federal health minister, Lanteigne argues. “You need the lever to be from the federal agency, with the appointed leader from New Brunswick, and they all sit at a command table with a patient representative for the public,” she says. “Otherwise, this stuff happens in a vacuum.”
Hendriks, former co-chair of the provincial oversight committee, reassures me that the group was created, in part, to counter runaway speculation. “I think we’re trying to calm the anxiety of people by saying, ‘We’re going to look into this and say, No, it’s not related to, I don’t know, the lobster in New Brunswick or anything specific.’ Our hope is probably that, over time, we will realize it’s part of the usual neurodegenerative pattern of all the diseases we see.”In so many young cases? Need science please from authorities, not hope.
Hendriks is referring to the null hypothesis, which remains a possibility. It’s also possible that, just as happened on Guam, an environmental trigger may elude detection no matter how much expertise is—or isn’t—brought to bear. One out-of-province researcher, who was consulted as a potential collaborator on the suspended federal investigation (and requested anonymity, not wishing to compromise their reinvolvement should the federal-provincial collaboration resume), believes the province may already have an endgame in mind. “I think what might happen is they’ll get to the end and announce that they have failed to find a clear diagnostic feature, or a link between the cases, so they don’t really have problem.”
Whatever the results, the secretive, expertise-eschewing nature of the process will for many be enough to cast doubt on its conclusions and leave open the question of political interference. Even if the province decides to reopen communication with its federal counterparts, months have now been lost, during which some of the country’s—and perhaps the world’s—most knowledgeable experts could have been trying to solve the deadly riddle.
In the meantime, New Brunswickers, especially those in the small communities dotting the province’s far north, have been answered with silence. Few likely struggle with the uncertainty more than those who have to contend with the mysterious condition. “I still have hope that there will be a cure or a treatment or answers,” Gabrielle Cormier said in late August. Her speech had become halting, and she needed time to collect her thoughts before each answer. “But I’m still realistic—it may not go that way.”
Matthew Halliday is a writer and editor in Halifax. He has written for the Globe and Mail, Hakai Magazine, and Chatelaine.
Bayer Proposes Paying $8 Billion to Settle Roundup Cancer Claims
by Jef Feeley , Joel Rosenblatt , and Tim Loh, with assistance by Tim Bross, Eyk Henning, and Albertina Torsoli, August 9, 2019, Bloomberg
Bayer AG is proposing to pay as much as $8 billion to settle more than 18,000 U.S. lawsuits alleging its Roundup herbicide causes cancer, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
An agreement, which could take months to work out, would ease investor pressure over massive litigation exposure the German drug and chemical giant took on with its purchase of the weedkiller’s maker, Monsanto Co. The fallout has erased more than $30 billion in market value, prompted an unprecedented shareholder vote of no confidence in the company’s management and fueled speculation about a breakup.
While Bayer floated paying $6 billion to $8 billion to resolve current and future cases, plaintiffs’ lawyers want more than $10 billion to drop their claims, the people said, asking not to be identified because the talks are private.
How to compensate consumers who have yet to be diagnosed with illness is a sticking point, and there’s no guarantee the two sides will come to terms anytime soon, they added.
Bayer spokesman Tino Andresen declined to comment on any settlement talks.
Reports that a $6 billion to $8 billion settlement proposal has been discussed are “pure fiction,” said Kenneth Feinberg, a mediator called in by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, who’s overseeing cases consolidated in federal court.
“There have been absolutely no discussions to date of dollars or what the compensation would be for a global resolution” of the cases, Feinberg said in an interview Friday.
Bayer’s lawyers and attorneys for former Roundup users are in ongoing talks, based in New York City, aimed at hammering out an accord to resolve all current cases and any future cancer claims filed over the world’s top-selling weedkiller, people familiar with the discussions said.
Cases Postponed
The negotiations have advanced to the point that Bayer and plaintiffs’ lawyers asked two judges in St. Louis to push back cases set for trial starting soon, the people said. Bayer Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann said at the end of July that he’d consider a “financially reasonable” settlement — after the company’s shares slumped amid a surge of new cases.
If a deal comes together, it would allay a shareholder revolt in the wake of three trial losses in a row in California that resulted in average payouts of almost $50 million per plaintiff after judges reduced jury verdicts that added up to more than $2.4 billion. Thousands of new cases followed each defeat.
Major investors — such as U.S.-based billionaire Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. — have been urging Bayer to drop its defend-at-all-cost approach to the suits and consider a settlement. Elliott disclosed in June that it has a $1.3 billion stake in Bayer.
Bayer traded 1.6% higher in Frankfurt after surging more than 11%. They’ve fallen about one-third in the 14 months since the Monsanto deal was completed. The bonds also rose.
“$8 billion would be lower than most analysts are forecasting and many investors fearing,” Markus Mayer, an analyst at Baader Helvea, wrote by email.
Bayer’s decision to seek postponement of the St. Louis trials is a clear signal settlement talks are progressing, said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who teaches about mass personal injury litigation. U.S. judges traditionally put cases on hold to give the parties a chance to resolve them, he said.
‘Great Deal’
“If they can get out of this for under $10 billion after losing three in a row — with big awards assessed — it would be a great deal for Bayer,” Tobias said. “They lose a couple of more big ones in St. Louis and settlement demand could balloon to $20 billion.”
Some litigation analysts have predicted Bayer will ultimately settle the cases for as little as $2.5 billion and as much as $20 billion. Experts have said that awards of tens of millions of dollars per plaintiff were a strong and bad sign for Bayer’s prospects in future trials, weakening its hand in settlement negotiations.
Feinberg, the mediator, previously administered compensation funds for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and later was hired by Volkswagen AG to oversee compensation for car owners affected by the diesel emissions-cheating scandal. He’s been working with attorneys for both Bayer and plaintiffs as they swap settlement proposals, the people said.
Mediator’s Role
Feinberg, appointed in May, had to work quickly as Bayer was slated to face the next Roundup trial starting Aug. 19 in state court in St. Louis, the former headquarters of Monsanto, which started selling Roundup in the 1970s.
Juries in another St. Louis-area court — known for favoring plaintiffs — have come back with some supersized awards over the years, including a $4.69 billion verdict in 2018 against Johnson & Johnson over claims its baby powder was tainted with asbestos.
Bayer insists that Roundup is safe. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday issued guidelines for products containing the herbicide’s active ingredient, glyphosate, saying it will no longer approve labels claiming that it’s known to cause cancer. California listed the substance as a carcinogen under its Proposition 65 toxic warnings law two years ago.
Which fairy tale would you like to hear?
That one about the harmlessness of glyphosate!
Court officials said this week that Roundup trials set for August and September will probably be postponed. They did not say whether the postponements were tied to settlement talks.
Bayer wants to avoid getting thumped with another $2 billion-plus verdict, like the one handed down in May by a jury in Oakland, California, to a husband and wife who both blamed their cancers on exposure to Roundup, Tobias said. Last month, a judge slashed that verdict by more than 95 percent to $86.7 million, saying it was beyond the limits allowed by legal precedent.
The Oakland award was the largest in the U.S. this year and the eighth-largest ever in a product-defect claim, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“They don’t want to try these cases in St. Louis,” Tobias said. “It could be worse than California.”
What Bloomberg Intelligence Says
“We still have reservations about the underlying business. Crop Science still faces macroeconomic risks and Pharma is in need of further deals, which could be scuttled by the need to delever and pay the settlement.”
But coming up with a way to corral all future claims in a settlement that withstands court scrutiny may be difficult, said Jean Eggen, a Widener University law professor who teaches about toxic torts and environmental law.
The U.S. Supreme Court hasn’t looked very favorably on other mass-tort settlements meant to resolve future claims over a product, she said.
“It’s much cleaner if you just settle the current cases and then when more come in, you add to the original settlement,” Eggen said. “It’s a less problematic way to do this.”
The consolidated case is In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2741, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
***
Refer also to:
… Ms Cleary was dismissed from her post in 2015 without explanation after highlighting the environmental dangers of fracking and while she was investigating potentially carcinogenic glysophates.
Aged 60, Ms Cleary died on Friday of ovarian cancer in the hospice in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
… Ms Cleary is survived by her partner Paul, four children and their father Gerry. …
2021: Health Canada: Poisoning Canadians to please Monsanto/Bayer, the oil patch and frac’ers?
2021: Cartoon by Chappatte, Enjoy your meal of glyphosate!
2017: Monsanto, EPA Fighting to Keep Glyphosate Cancer Review Secret
2012: Why was a 2012 Health Canada Report, admitting significant health hazards and risks to groundwater and air from hydraulic fracturing, kept from the public?If federal and provincial gov’ts won’t come clean about frac chemicals poisoning us, our communities, water, air, land and food in frac fields in Canada, they sure as hell aren’t going to about Roundup damaging our brains and or killing us. The many $billions in private profits and the corporations making them, are protetected no matter what. Poisoning and killing a few hundred Canadians here and there is standard “Best Practice” andjust the usual cost of doing business. “Perfectly safe.”
