Mysterious Brain Syndrome Attacks Canada

Forty-eight people in the same small Canadian state suffered from mysterious symptoms, including hallucinations such as insomnia, motor dysfunction, and the nightmarish hallucinations of the dead.

An unrealistic neurologist working 12 hours a day to decipher clues.

Conspiracy theories are swirling that blame the disease on cell phone towers, fracking, or the Covid-19 vaccine.

These have embarrassed Canadian medical institutions, attracted the attention of the world’s top neurologists, and scared among the inhabitants of New Brunswick, a picturesque state of about 770,000 people on Canada’s Atlantic coast. It’s just a small part of the fanned mystery. Over the last six years, dozens of people have become ill with the disease and six have died.

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“People are worried,” said Yvon Godin, mayor of Bertland, a village on the Acadian Peninsula in northeastern New Brunswick. “They said,’Is it an environmental problem? Is it heredity? Is it fish or venison? Is it something else? Everyone wants an answer.”

The medical mystery initially took some time to reach the public’s attention as the coronavirus raged nationwide in the last 15 months. Canadian health officials were distracted by the need to respond to a pandemic and rushed to determine the severity of the outbreak, but in March a memo by New Brunswick’s chief medical officer was leaked to the press. Later, it was publicly announced.

Doctors investigating the disease say the slowdown in response highlights the challenge of other medical conditions competing in the spotlight during a global pandemic.

Medical professionals say that the ambiguity surrounding the disease, despite the phenomenal advances in medicine, can confuse even the brains of some of the best scientists in the world, with some conditions, especially neurological disorders including dementia. He said it reflects the sex.

The epidemic in Canada could join the Hall of Fame for other illnesses that have embarrassed the world, including debilitating illnesses that damaged dozens of diplomats in Cuba and China in 2016, with victims in Moscow. There was also a painful and mysterious kidney disease that afflicted workers harvesting sugar cane in Nicaragua four years ago. ..

However, the mystery can disappear if various existing conditions are found to be premature to be the cause of a strange new illness.

Among the youngest victims of Canadian Syndrome is Gabriel Colmier, a 20-year-old student of Straight A who attended a figure skating competition and aspired to become a pathologist.

But when he entered college two years ago, Cormier said he was suddenly overwhelmed by unexplained fatigue, began to bump into something, and saw a vision that seemed stationary on television. I couldn’t easily read books or walk to school, and I was forced to drop out of school.

The inability to understand what went wrong exacerbated the fear of the disease. After being misdiagnosed as mononucleosis, Cormier said an emergency outpatient doctor told her that there was nothing wrong with her. Said. A series of tests did not give a diagnosis. She was eventually referred to a neurologist because her health deteriorated and she experienced involuntary convulsive movements, memory loss, and hallucinations. She was one of the first to be included in a cluster of people suffering from unidentified syndrome.

She currently lives at her home at Darjee Junction in the countryside of northern New Brunswick and walks with a cane. “I was just starting to be the best chapter in your life, but it’s gone,” she said. “I don’t know if I will die or live my life with these symptoms.”

Dr. Neil Cashman, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) who is investigating the disease, said the disease is a type of medical hoodanite that is only seen a few times in the first century.

“From a mystery standpoint, there are usually horrific things like murder. In this case, it’s a rapidly developing dementia and psychiatric symptomatology that loses everything controlled by the brain and spinal cord at once,” he said. Said. “It’s scary.”

However, other health professionals questioned the novelty of the disease.

Dr. Michael Geschwind, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, is one of the world’s leading experts in rare neurological outbreaks, but has not studied cases or autopsy of affected individuals. However, he warned that while it may appear to be a new illness, it may turn out to be an undiagnosed known illness. He warned that the affected people were related to each other. He added that he may suffer from a “grab bag” of a heterogeneous neurodegenerative disease.

“What looks like a cluster can turn out to be another cluster,” he said.

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The disease was first observed in 2015 by Dr. Ariel Marello, a neurologist in New Brunswick, with a strange mix of anxiety, depression, rapidly developing dementia, myalgia, and horrific visual impairment. It was when I saw a patient who had symptoms.

Three years later, he experienced a total of eight cases. The next year totaled 20. After that it was 38. After that it was 48.

Patients are between the ages of 18 and 84 and live in two regions of New Brunswick, Moncton and the Acadian Peninsula.

Dr. Marello, a doctor at the Georges-L. Dumont University Hospital Center in Moncton, was embarrassed by what he was observing and ordered a blood test, a lumbar puncture, an MRI scan, and an electroencephalogram.

According to Marello, tests revealed abnormalities such as cerebral atrophy and neurological dysfunction, but none of the results combined to make a definitive diagnosis.

He initially suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rapidly developing neurodegenerative disease thought to be caused by prion, a new infectious pathogen that damages the brain. However, the patient tested negative for known CJD.

He perused medical books. He consulted with colleagues around the world. In the end, he said, only one conclusion, “it was something I had never seen before,” makes sense.

He gave the catastrophic illness a clearly mediocre work name, undiagnosed. A neurological syndrome of unknown cause in New Brunswick. He also sounded an alarm and notified colleagues and federal and state health authorities.

In April, six years after the first case occurred, health authorities in New Brunswick and Ottawa, the capital of Canada, brought together a team of neurologists, public health researchers, environmentalists, and veterinarians to investigate. Autopsy of the brains of the six victims has been analyzed at a federal laboratory in Ottawa, and a team of neurologists and pathologists across Canada are reviewing the evidence.

Of the three autopsies performed so far, all known forms of prion disease were negative, according to Dr. Michael Cole Cole, a neurologist who leads the study.

Medical investigators said the list of potential causes was narrowed down to four or five.

Cashman, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia, said the disease is produced by blue-green algae, by blue-green algae, and diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

According to him, another potential cause is chronic exposure to domoic acid, a neurotoxin found in shellfish off the coast of New Brunswick.

He said the team did not rule out that it could be a new prion disease or a syndrome caused by infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses and fungi.

Some families of people suffering from symptoms are angry that health officials took a very long time to reveal them.

Stephen Ellis, whose father Roger is involved in the New Brunswick epidemic, said his family wanted to know if the condition was genetic or external. Once a cheerful and active father, his father is now trapped in an elderly housing with care and suffers from weight loss, irritability and delusions.

After reading an internal note from a New Brunswick public health officer leaked in March, Ellis linked it to her father’s illness.

“It was as if we were reading the story of our private family,” he recalls. “The pandemic has masked the disease. Why did it take so long to get public?”

Dr. Jennifer Russell, New Brunswick Chief Medical Officer, said at a press conference in April that state health officials were cautious when federal health officials determined that case numbers were important. There is a “long way” to find out, she said.

But Ellis said a family like him wouldn’t have time anymore.

“If my dad had terminal cancer, of course, he would be upset, but at least he would have a prognosis,” he said. “We see him dying slowly, and why. No one tells me. “