Last summer, Dr. Alier Marrero told The Globe and Mail that the number of people he was treating at the time with similar symptoms was more than 200. Last week, in an interview published with The New York Times, Dr. Marrero said he has more than 430 such patients in his care. Of them, 111 are under 45, and 39 have died.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
It has been nine years since a neurologist in New Brunswick saw his first patient suffering from a mysterious neurodegenerative disease that causes a multitude of symptoms – crippling pain, muscle atrophy, loss of co-ordination, partial paralysis, hallucinations, blindness, memory loss, cognitive impairment, dementia and psychosis, among others – in patients of all ages, teenagers included.
That was in 2015. Last summer, Alier Marrero, the neurologist in question, told The Globe and Mail that the number of people he was treating at the time with similar symptoms was more than 200. In an interview published last week in The New York Times, he said he has more than 430 such patients in his care. Of them, 111 are under 45, and 39 have died.
New Brunswick appears to be home to a mysterious undiagnosed disease cluster, something Dr. Marrero has been saying for years. The number of patients is growing every year. Many of them are healthy before they suddenly fall gravely ill. Their symptoms come on rapidly and can’t be explained by traditional diagnoses. Husbands and wives, or other genetically unrelated people in the same household, fall ill together, ruling out a genetic predisposition.
As well, most of the first 50 or so people to fall ill were grouped in two geographical areas in New Brunswick, raising the possibility of an environmental cause for their suffering, such as a pesticide or other contaminant in the air, the water or in patients’ food.
And yet the New Brunswick government has chosen to look away. It said in a terse 2022 report that, having re-examined the original 50 cases, there was no evidence of “a neurological syndrome of unknown cause,” and therefore no need to search for a possible environmental contaminant.
That is the position the government still holds today. But it has never been a convincing one.
For starters, it’s a change from the government’s original stance. In 2021, the province eagerly signed on to an investigation to be carried out by a federal-provincial multidisciplinary team that would put boots on the ground in New Brunswick in order to establish the existence of the cluster and search for a possible cause.
But by the middle of the year, the province had flexed its jurisdictional muscle and shut down the broader investigation. It launched its own, much less thorough, investigation in June, 2021, and eight months later said there was nothing to see here, folks.
As well, the government’s finding doesn’t jibe with the experience of the people suffering from the neurological symptoms found in the cluster. For instance, the government report said the patients were potentially suffering from illnesses that their diagnoses had, in fact, already ruled out.
In March, 2023, when the number of cases approached 150, a group of patients called on the New Brunswick government to restart the federal-provincial investigation.
That’s the same call made last year by a group of New Brunswick medical students, scientists and health-care workers – and for yet another compelling reason: testing has shown that as many as 90 per cent of Dr. Marrero’s patients have extremely high levels of glyphosate in their blood.
Glyphosate is one of the most commonly used herbicides in Canada and the world. It is critical to the forestry industry and is used heavily in New Brunswick, often sprayed from helicopters.
But glyphosate is under attack in Canada and elsewhere, as it has been linked to neurological diseases. Quebec stopped using it on Crown land and under powerlines in 2001, and the province allows workers exposed to glyphosate and other herbicides over a long period who come down with Parkinson’s disease to collect compensation. Indigenous groups in New Brunswick and Ontario are also demanding that it stop being used.
The chemical can be dangerous on its own in high concentrations, but it is also known to promote the growth of blue-green algae, which produces a neurotoxin linked to cognitive and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and which can get into seafood.
This is all the more reason that New Brunswick, along the federal government, need to reboot the original investigation into this mysterious disease cluster.
The courageous Dr. Marrero and others have been sounding the alert for long enough. People are getting sick. Many of them are dying. And their governments are failing them.