They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why.

[A patient] 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.

Thankfully, the patient was Canadian so the wife survived the encounter.

I'm really glad this is getting proper media attention. This has been going on for a while and I haven't seen much outside of small blips in Canadian media until now.

A well loved coworker died of Crutzfeld Jakob disease this year. That shit is terrifying.

He was in his 50s and went from normal, to nonverbal, easily startled, and not recognizing close family, to dead in a span of like 4 months.

Absolutely terrifying.

Hmm, they shut down the 48 patients suffering from odd neurodegerative diseases in 2021....

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.

What the fuckkk. :/

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.”

Well shit. Not what I was expecting to read in this article. ALS, Parkinsons, and Alzheimers are the three diseases that most terrify me. Something that hollows out who you are, leaving you semi conscious in a waking prison built of your own body. You can lose limbs and still be you. You can't lose your brain and still be you. It's a disease that destroys the ephemeral "you," leaving only a husk of your former self. To think that we could be the ones causing it, with our massive over-use of herbicides, is equally terrifying. Because just like with PFAS exacerbating all cancers, there are rich, influential firms with powerful lobbying groups actively fighting against the very regulation that could save us.

This was actively covered up through the strong-arming of the person in charge of the autopsies.

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.

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.

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.

Interestingly, the wikipedia article on glyphosates says basically nothing about their role in Parkinson's and instead focuses on debunking cancer claims.

Absolutely not suspicious at all.

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.

This is frightening.

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.

And I made it about two more paragraphs after this before closing the window. This is just too much bad news first thing in the morning. Sigh.

The Canadaland podcast has been covering this story for a while now.

Sounds like the government is covering something up.

https://archive.is/qiDwJ

Holy shit that is dystopic as hell.

God how I fucking hate these trope-y headlines that modern journalists think will make them competitive with the Internet

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