We are pleased to report, a decade after a neurologist in New Brunswick noticed a cluster of patients suffering from an unidentified neurodegenerative disease, that the province has finally put its finger on the problem: the doctor, his patients and the media.
Buried deep in a report released late last month – which, like a previous government report, fights hard to persuade the public that there is nothing to see here, folks – is an imperious scolding of those who dared speak up. The report notes the “very public and proactive approaches taken by the reporting physician and others involved” and then complains of “the significant harms have likely occurred from the widespread dissemination of these concerns” without “proper validation,” going on to castigate the media.
This is an insult to the scores of New Brunswickers, teenagers included, who have endured such varied symptoms as crippling pain, muscle atrophy, loss of co-ordination, partial paralysis, hallucinations, blindness, memory loss, cognitive impairment, dementia or psychosis – and to those who have died. It is also a perversion of the facts.
In 2015, a neurologist named Alier Marrero started seeing dozens of patients suffering cognitive and physical decline that couldn’t be pinned to one specific neurological disorder.
N.B. report finds no environmental links to unknown neurological illness in patients
He alerted the Public Health Agency of Canada, which by 2021 was referring in internal correspondence – later disclosed – to a “neurological syndrome of unknown cause/etiology.” Media in Canada and around the world picked up on the story of a mystery brain disease in New Brunswick.
The province agreed that year to work with PHAC on an investigation to establish the existence of a cluster and search for a possible cause. But suddenly, halfway through 2021, the province announced it would go it alone on a much less thorough investigation held behind closed doors.
When released in 2022, that investigation concluded there was no mystery disease, that people were dying of known conditions, and that there was no environmental factor, such as food sources or exposure to toxins, linking the victims.
Dr. Marrero was mystified. His patients were incensed. They were particularly irked when the report suggested they were potentially suffering from illnesses their treating physicians had already ruled out. They banded together in Facebook groups and elsewhere to make themselves heard.
As additional patients with similar conditions came forward, pressure grew on the government to reopen the federal-provincial investigation. More medical experts added their name to that call after Dr. Marrero said in 2023 that laboratory testing had found high levels of glyphosate – a herbicide used liberally by New Brunswick’s forestry and agriculture industries – in 90 per cent of his patients’ blood.
(Glyphosate is not currently known to cause neurological diseases in humans but it can be a proxy for other toxic exposures, or an indication of a shared environment.)
In 2024, Premier Susan Holt, running in the election her Liberal Party would go on to win, vowed if victorious to hold “an open and transparent scientific investigation into what is making New Brunswickers sick.” She did not.
Her government’s report, released last month, limited itself to a single objective: assessing whether the blood tests from Dr. Marrero’s patients suggested that herbicides or metals were contributing factors in their illnesses.
The study found, rather limply, that there was nothing in those tests “that might lead us to conclude that exposure to either of these could potentially be a contributing factor to these patients’ illnesses.”
The only “significant harm” the Holt government could find was that patients and their doctor talked to the media and “helped to fuel distrust in public institutions that have the wellbeing of patients and all New Brunswickers at heart.”
This is a shameless shifting of blame. Under both Ms. Holt and her Progressive Conservative predecessor, Blaine Higgs, the government has done everything it could to avoid holding a proper investigation into the suffering of its residents.
It has never bothered to establish whether so large a cluster of neurological disorders is unusual by comparing it to other provinces or historical baselines. Instead, it has satisfied itself that there is no novel disease on the loose and that the patients’ blood tests are inconclusive – while remaining curiously incurious about why people might be falling ill.
Trust is not earned by declaring questions closed; it is earned by finding answers. New Brunswick has yet to do that.