New Brunswick Liberal Leader Susan Holt speaks to reporters at the legislative building in Fredericton, on Oct. 17, 2023.Ron Ward/The Canadian Press
The leader of the Liberal Party of New Brunswick pledged to launch a rigorous scientific investigation into a mystery brain illness that is seemingly affecting a growing number of people if her team forms the next government in the coming provincial election.
Official Opposition Leader Susan Holt said New Brunswickers suffering from unexplained symptoms and the doctors trying to help them have been ignored by Premier Blaine Higgs’s government for too long.
“What we think we really need is an open and transparent scientific investigation into what is making New Brunswickers sick,” she said in an interview.
New Brunswick health officials first raised the alarm in 2021 about a mysterious brain disease afflicting residents in the province. At the time, there were 48 patients of all ages whose symptoms included rapidly progressing dementia, muscle spasms and atrophy. A multidisciplinary team of provincial and national officials was convened, with Public Health New Brunswick leading an investigation. But the Canadian Institutes of Health Research was soon told its help would no longer be needed, CIHR spokesperson David Coulombe has said.
The following year, an oversight committee, which included independent neurologists, found no evidence that a neurological syndrome of unknown cause exists in the province, or that the patients exhibited the same symptoms or shared any common illness. Then-health minister Dorothy Shephard said provincial health officials believe many of the cases were misdiagnosed by a single neurologist.
Patients, families and the patient advocacy group BloodWatch, run by Kat Lanteigne who lives in Toronto but is from New Brunswick, questioned these conclusions. They were upset that no additional testing was done into federal medical expert hypotheses that something in the environment had made patients ill. Leading theories were that patients might have become sick after eating contaminated seafood or been exposed to the industrial herbicide glyphosate.
Advocates accused the New Brunswick government of abandoning scientific rigour in exchange for political expediency – an opinion a top federal scientist at the Public Health Agency of Canada also expressed in a private e-mail to a colleague, which was provided to The Globe and Mail.
Now, Ms. Holt, if she becomes premier in the New Brunswick election, set to be held on or before Oct. 21, is promising to change that. The MLA for Bathurst East-Nepisiguit-Saint-Isidore, an area where people have gotten sick, said her team has consulted with experts and has a plan for New Brunswick Public Health to launch an investigation with help from federal experts.
In a recent interview, Dr. Alier Marrero, the neurologist whose initial work first raised concerns, said the number of his patients experiencing unexplained rapid neurodegeneration now totals 325 people from Atlantic Canada, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, ranging in age from 17 to 80. He said they were all referred to him by specialists, physicians and nurse practitioners.
Ms. Holt said she has recently consulted with Dr. Marrero, as well as patients, Ms. Lanteigne of BloodWatch, the province’s Department of Health, and researchers to try to understand what’s possible.
One of the leading theories federal officials had been exploring was exposure to a toxin called beta-methylaminoL-alanine, or BMAA, which is produced by cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, the speed and intensity of which is on the rise in Canada in more areas owing to climate change. BMAA has been linked, but is also highly contested in the scientific community, to an increased risk of neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS and Alzheimer’s.
“We need to understand whether this is coming from blue-green algae or glyphosate or environmental factors,” Ms. Holt said. “We need that to be done properly and with peer review and scientific process, but we need to be doing it in a way that is public to New Brunswickers who have been asking questions about this and been left in the dark for too long.”
Ms. Holt said her plan includes accepting federal assistance that was previously offered, building a team of researchers and doing a “rigorous and proper scientific investigation” that uses existing data, communicating with families and patients, and zeroing in on areas where people with unexplained neurological illness have turned up in high frequency.
Doug Williams, executive director of the Progressive Conservative Party of New Brunswick, defended the province’s investigation. He said Public Health NB, under supervision of organizations such as the Public Health Agency of Canada, engaged experts in a thorough review of this situation and posted its final report online on Feb. 24, 2022.
“It’s disappointing to see Susan Holt disregard scientific findings in favour of political games,” Mr. Williams wrote in an e-mail to The Globe.
“Does Susan Holt not trust Public Health NB? Can Ms. Holt clarify which of the experts that participated in the previous review she believes were unqualified?”
Ms. Holt said she appreciates those points, but said “there are still questions and there haven’t been answers about what is making New Brunswickers sick.”
“People are scared and families need answers.”