A JD Irving forestry sign on the highway near Sackville, NB, on the outskirts of the Greater Moncton Area, one of the geographic 'clusters' linked to mysterious neurological symptoms experienced by hundreds of people in the province.Chris Donovan/The Globe and Mail
New Brunswick has started combing through the files of hundreds of patients suffering from undiagnosed neurological symptoms to find out whether something in the environment may be triggering their ailments.
After months of inaction and finger pointing over paperwork delays, New Brunswick Chief Medical Officer Yves Léger said the province has enough information to launch the review of files from Alier Marrero, the neurologist who has been raising alarm about elevated levels of heavy metals and pesticides in test results of the patients.
“Even though this work has taken much longer than we anticipated when we started this investigation, we certainly remain committed to completing it and to consider what else needs to be done to help patients and their families,” Dr. Léger told media at the announcement Thursday in Fredericton.
It’s the latest chapter in a protracted five-year fight that has led to accusations of a political coverup, the muzzling of federal scientists and potential bias in medical assessments.
In 2020, Dr. Marrero began alerting health officials about what at the time was widely referred to as a mysterious brain disease afflicting patients. The province convened a panel of federal and scientific experts, many of whom had raised the possibility of environmental exposure at the root of the symptoms. But those meetings abruptly stopped and New Brunswick declined $5-million in emergency research funding from the federal government.
In 2022, Public Health New Brunswick published the results of its own investigation by six neurologists finding no evidence of a shared common illness or unknown syndrome.
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A public outcry followed as Dr. Marrero, his patients, advocates and later, through leaked private correspondence, two prominent Canadian scientists, decried a lack of rigour in the work. Michael Coulthart, head of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, said a deeper scientific probe into possible environmental exposures was needed, while Sam Weiss, a former scientific director for the Institute of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction at Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), said the province appeared to make choices for political expediency and not in the best interests of patients.
During last year’s provincial election campaign, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt promised a scientific investigation. But even after she won, the process stalled. The province required Dr. Marrero to provide an enhanced questionnaire for each patient that in some cases were hundreds of pages long.
After months of blaming each other for the standstill, finally on Thursday, Dr. Léger announced that there is now data on 222 of 392 identified patients, enough for the Chief Medical Officer to begin analysis with support from a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) epidemiologist – an exercise to be completed by the end of next month. A public report with possible next steps is to be presented this summer.
If the findings of the review indicate elevated levels of environmental substances among patients, potentially posing a risk to their health and appearing at rates higher than expected in the general population, Dr. Léger said the next step may be to launch a scientific investigation that looks at why, how and where people are being exposed.
He said it wouldn’t be appropriate for PHAC to run the review, which patients and advocates have asked for, as the majority of cases are in New Brunswick and the issue continues to be reported by one physician, Moncton-based Dr. Marrero. There are 16 patients identified outside the province, mainly in other Atlantic provinces, but also Quebec, Ontario and Alberta.
Dr. Léger didn’t rule out an independent scientific investigation at arm’s length from government – something that Michael Strong, a neurological scientist at Western University and former president of the CIHR, told The Globe and Mail in an exclusive interview earlier this year is necessary to cut through the politicization of the issue in New Brunswick.
“Once the work is completed, we expect that there will be additional work that will need to be done as well,” Dr. Léger said. “And there may be a bigger role to play for the Public Health Agency of Canada or other organizations.”
He said he has asked the federal government if the $5-million in research money is still on offer. When asked whether it was a mistake to conclude the previous investigation without looking into environmental causes, Dr. Léger said the goal of that probe was different and appropriate at the time – looking into whether there was a possible common illness among patients.
“There was no reason to believe that there were environmental causes that were at play at that time,” he said.
Patient advocate Stacie Quigley Cormier disagreed, saying concerns about environmental exposures had been raised since Day 1.
She described the announcement as “rinse and repeat” – a review, which is a far cry from the scientific investigation Ms. Holt promised in her election campaign.
“They really need to understand that there is a crisis here that is going on environmentally for families, multiple members of families,” she said. “After I hear someone apologizing for how this is taking so long, I don’t accept their apology.”
Dr. Marrero was not at the news conference and was not immediately available for comment.
Editor’s note: (March 28, 2025): This article has been updated to correct the title of Sam Weiss, a former scientific director for the Institute of Neuroscience, Mental Health and Addiction at Canadian Institutes of Health Research.