Mystery cluster of brain disease striking healthy adults robbing them of ability to talk, walk

A cluster of mysterious brain diseases has affected at least 200 people in a small county and baffled doctors.

More than 200 residents of New Brunswick, Canada, have been affected by the dementia-like condition that causes vivid hallucinations, an inability to talk and write, memory loss and even physical paralysis.

Experts say the cases date back to 2015 and belong to people aged 18 to 84, dozens of whom were healthy before being stricken with the mystery illness.

One such patient is Gabrielle Cormier who, at the age of 20had to interrupt her love of figure skating and leave university when she fell ill in 2019 and became so debilitated that she now needs a wheelchair.

Health officials investigating the cases are investigating whether the culprit is food and water contaminated with blue-green algal blooms in water sources.

Another was heavy exposure to the herbicide glyphosate.

What began in 2021 as a government-wide investigation with all hands on deck ended in February 2022 when officials insisted the cases were unrelated.

The government’s abrupt halt to its investigation into the mysterious condition suggested to medical experts that it wanted to protect its financial interests, namely the area’s huge fishing and forest industries.

A doctor at the center of the mystery, Dr. Alier Marrero, continued to push for a government-led investigation and saw patients in New Brunswick with the symptoms, recently telling Canadaland that the number of cases had surpassed 200.

The patients were mainly located in two parts of New Brunswick: Moncton and the Acadian Peninsula.

Dr. Marrero, a doctor from Moncton, was the first to notice the symptoms in patients there.

In 2018, Dr. Marrero had seen a total of eight cases. The following year the total was 20, the year after that 38. And up to 48 in April 2021. After that the province stopped counting.

But patients still sought help from Dr. Marrero, who had become one of Canada’s top authorities on the mysterious cluster of cases.

He informed government officials in 2021 that he had just referred two new patients – one in his 30s and another in his 50s – suffering from progressive Alzheimer’s disease.

A barrage of blood tests, epidurals, and brain scans performed on the patients revealed brain atrophy and neurological dysfunction, but not in such a uniform way among the patients that Dr. Marrero could make a clear diagnosis.

Most patients had dementia-like symptoms. Some suddenly couldn’t form words and had uncontrollable muscle spasms, difficulty moving and fatigue.

Gabriel Cormier, now 23, experienced memory loss, vision problems and the inability to stand for long periods of time, which forced her to walk with a cane or use a wheelchair in October 2019 after falling ill.

DREAM DRAWN OF HER: Cormier says she had a passion for figure skating since she was eight years old, adding “it was my life.” But the mysterious dementia-like neurological disease left her unable to walk on her own and forced her to give up ice skating as well as her time at university.

She told a Canadian news outlet in 2021, “I’m trying to make a bad situation better by making my cane pretty.”

‘The reason we went back to the ice rink was because I was afraid of dying and wanted to get on the ice one last time;

The investigation, which saw possible environmental toxicity as the cause, came to an abrupt halt in May 2021.

Suddenly, the idea that the cluster of cases was a cluster at all was called into question based on criteria early in the study that restricted participation in the “cluster” to patients who had no known diagnosis.

Government investigators said: ‘There is no evidence of a cluster of neurological syndrome of unknown cause.

‘Neurological disorders can be very difficult to diagnose and it is common for individuals to show less common presentations of known diseases; however…people who were part of this cluster had symptoms that varied widely from case to case and there was no evidence of a shared common disease or of a syndrome of unknown cause.”

The average age of onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms is in the mid-60s, and the fact that his patients were much younger worried Dr. Marrero.

In May 2021, Dr. Marrero wrote to civil servants: ‘Unfortunately I have more and younger patients.

“One of the most striking features of our patients is the hallucinations (visual, as well as tactile and auditory) and the ever-terrifying hallucinatory dreams, which evolve to be constant even when awake.”

At the time, there had been nine deaths from the disease, which Ottawa-based neuropathologist Dr. Gerard Jansen attributed to diagnosable neurological conditions, including a brain tumor and vascular dementia.

But Dr. Marrero hadn’t given up his suspicion that environmental toxins were to blame.

He discovered a comprehensive diagnostic test designed in Quebec that would measure his patients’ exposure to herbicides used in their area.

Doctor Marrero told the Canadaland podcast: ‘We’ve had about 200 patients tested so far. At first I was not aware that this was available and I thought they were only testing one substance, but they are actually testing four.’

The four herbicides being tested are widely used in the province.

‘The vast majority of my patients have exposures well above the detection level to one or more of these substances, and sometimes even very high. I’m talking about people who are not professionally exposed. They’re not working on this [agricultural] industry after all, and this is winter.’

The neurological condition of New Brunswick residents is just one of many mysterious health problems that have plagued people with no apparent cause.

Perhaps the most notable is Havana syndrome, a condition of unknown origin that first emerged in US diplomats stationed in Cuba in 2016.

More recently, CDC researchers dug into a rash of rare and serious brain abscesses in children in and around Las Vegas, Nevada.

The number of brain abscesses in minors tripled in Nevada last year, from an average of four or five a year to 18.

Doctors aren’t sure what caused the rise, but said it could be due to weakened immunity to infection due to Covid measures such as lockdowns.