Here is a link to subscribe to the New York Times. It is not an affiliate link. I just think that if you can afford it, the New York Times is invaluable.
In addition to today’s resource below, please review
Introduction to the Concept of Signal Toxicity. [PubMed Abstract] [Full-Text HTML] [Full-Text PDF]. J Toxicol Sci. 2016;41(Special):SP105-SP109. doi: 10.2131/jts.41.SP105.
There are 98 similar articles in PubMed.
The above article has been cited by nine articles in PubMed.
In addition to today’s resource below, please see Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals to Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do about It
by Leonardo Trasande
Today I review, link to, and excerpt from the outstanding New York Times article on environmental toxins: They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why: Doctors in Canada have identified dozens of patients with similar, unexplained symptoms — a scientific puzzle that has now become a political maelstrom.
All that follows is excerpted from the above resource.
It turned out that Laurie Beatty was just one of many local residents who had gone to Marrero’s office exhibiting similar, inexplicable symptoms of neurological decline — more than 20 in the previous four years.
In each case, Marrero struggled to determine a definitive diagnosis. The symptoms belonged to a broad spectrum of neurological disorders, but there was always something starkly atypical about the patients’ presentation.
Even more alarming, many of the patients were unusually young. Nearly half were middle-aged, and a few were in their 20s and 30s. At a presentation to a panel of experts at the University of British Columbia, Marrero recalled “crying out for help,” as he puts it. “What else can I do in terms of testing? What am I missing?”
. . . Marrero had come to believe that his patients were suffering from a previously undescribed illness. “When you have not seen something,” he later told a reporter, “it is very likely that we have not learned to see it.”
According to P.H.A.C. scientists, both the number of undiagnosable patients and, more important, their ages were “unprecedented at the national and provincial levels.” They called it the “New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown etiology.” In March 2021, when a memo alerting local doctors to the existence of the mysterious illness leaked to the press, the news made headlines around the world. Marrero’s patients and their families hoped that an explanation for their suffering would soon be revealed.
Three years later, however, no satisfactory explanation has been found, and the New Brunswick syndrome remains shrouded in mystery — and controversy. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether something in the environment may be responsible, at least in part, for the onset of the patients’ illness.
Neurodegenerative diseases are among the leading causes of death and disability worldwide, yet their origins largely remain mysterious. We don’t know what triggers them in some people over others or exactly how the interplay of various risk factors contributes. Genetics clearly play a role, as do aging and lifestyle considerations like smoking and heavy drinking. But genetics alone account for only a small percentage of cases of the best-known brain disorders — Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. The remaining cases appear to be a product of a complex interplay of genetic predisposition and environmental factors, including exposure to toxic substances, which a growing number of researchers believe may be responsible for triggering the onset of degeneration. The precise mechanisms behind that triggering, however, remain stubbornly elusive.
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.”
Despite the growing consensus, the link remains diabolically difficult to prove.
In New Brunswick, the evidence for a shared environmental contaminant was strong. The patients were grouped in two primary locations: the Moncton area and the Acadian Peninsula, a francophone region home to picturesque fishing villages and blueberry farms along New Brunswick’s northeast coast. Investigators wondered whether a common source of food or water might explain the geographic clustering. There were also a number of households with multiple patients who were not genetically linked: husbands and wives, stepfathers and stepdaughters, a nursing student and her ward. These “close contact” cases were difficult to explain outside of a common exposure.
The hard part was figuring out what that exposure might be.
If this potential cluster of patients really was being caused by a toxic substance, it would offer a rare chance to study the toxin-brain relationship in real time.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russell announced that the oversight committee had finished its work. The survey, she said, ‘‘could find no common exposure in the group.’’ It was the same conclusion that Jansen, the neuropathologist, reached after his autopsies. In short, the syndrome didn’t exist.
Dr. Michael Coulthart, head of the federal surveillance system for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, was even more direct. “My scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in NB that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist,” he wrote in an email to colleagues. He, too, felt that the decline in Marrero’s patients was most likely caused by an environmental trigger. “I believe the truth will assert itself in time,” he concluded.
The province has maintained that its investigation was scientifically sound and that the Public Health Agency of Canada supported the results, but implicit in its version of events was a sobering concession. According to provincial officials, the patients were suffering not from an unknown illness but from incurable diseases that are known all too well. And they were doing so at rates, especially among young people, that were shockingly high.
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.
There had been clinical developments as well. 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.On their own, the results mean little. Without a control group, it’s impossible to understand the results in context. Perhaps everyone in New Brunswick has elevated levels of glyphosate because of spraying in the province. The findings do, however, align with an increased push throughout Canada and the world to recognize the risks that chemicals like glyphosate pose to human health. 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. “I am not concluding that this is the cause of what is happening,” Marrero said. “But it is something that is telling me that something is wrong with the environment they live in.”Marrero’s conviction notwithstanding, the fact remains that the situation in New Brunswick has raised far more questions than answers. Was the epidemiological study blocked by political or corporate interests, as Marrero told me he suspected? Or was he an overzealous physician who had rushed to stamp his name on a novel disease, as the province’s report implied? And of course the answer to the most fundamental question of all — what exactly is making New Brunswickers ill? — remains elusive.What does seem clear, however, is that the collision of politics and science unfolding there is unlikely to remain exclusive to the province. As the evidence linking neurological disorders and environmental factors continues to grow, the way in which diseases manifest in the human body will undoubtedly be altered as well. It’s not difficult to imagine the next puzzling disease cluster right around the corner.It’s a concern that keeps Marrero up at night. “This is a collective effort that is needed,” he said. “Not only for the people here in New Brunswick, but because whatever is causing this might be happening elsewhere.” He has already received referrals from a half-dozen other Canadian provinces. When I asked how he thought the situation would play out over the long term, he was uncertain. “I don’t pretend to have the answer,” he said. “I think science should be the answer.”
