The province of New Brunswick in Canada is home to a mysterious cluster of brain diseases in some of its residents - even in young persons in their 20s and 30s. The numbers of persons stricken (currently 430) with neurodegenerative brain diseases and dying is growing, and at this time no one knows exactly why this is happening.
One possibility is pesticide exposure, especially the pesticide (herbicide) glyphosate. Glyphosate is heavily used in the province in the forest industry, which is also a main industry. The herbicide is heavily used in clear cuts and tree plantations.
Lab tests found incredibly high levels of the pesticide glyphosate in the persons with the neurological symptoms. But after these results were revealed, the provincial government basically shut all research down. A doctor who was instrumental in bringing attention to this mysterious brain disease cluster was muzzled. Uh oh... a political and industry cover up?
The NY Times did an in-depth investigation, and the article written by Greg Donohue makes for fascinating reading. They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They're Fighting to Learn Why.
The article pointed out that 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. There is a link between glyphosate and an increased risk for Parkinson's disease and other health problems, including cancer.
A further discussion of that investigation and the role of pesticides (glyphosate) in brain diseases. Good list of references for more information. Excerpts from Beyond Pesticides: One Of World's Largest Dementia Clusters In Young People May Be Tied To High Blood Levels Of Glyphosate
A piercing investigative article in the August 14 New York Times by journalist Greg Donahue reveals the abandonment of a group of brain disease patients in an area of Canada with forestry management for paper products, agriculture, and large amounts of pesticide use, including glyphosate. It illustrates the tension in the relationship between government authorities, regulated industries, and neurologist (physician) on the front lines. The article details the manner in which health officials appeared to manipulate their own investigation of a disease cluster to make it less disruptive to the economy of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. (This Beyond Pesticides analysis, where not otherwise indicated, draws on Mr. Donahue’s article.)
New Brunswick has one major town, Moncton, and a large rural area characterized by agriculture and forestry. The province’s agriculture industry is dominated by blueberry production, which occupies the fourth largest amount of agricultural land in New Brunswick. About half the province is forested, with increasing amounts of land devoted to tree plantations intended for paper production.
Glyphosate is hands-down the most heavily used pesticide in New Brunswick forestry, and New Brunswick is second only to Ontario in Canada’s total area of glyphosate-treated forest. The herbicide is especially heavily used in clearcuts and tree plantations.
Glyphosate’s innocence, assumed for decades since it entered the market in 1974, has been thoroughly disproved. According to a comprehensive 2020 review, it is toxic to cells; disrupts hormones and gut microbe balance; contributes to non-alcoholic liver disease; may trigger heart arrhythmias; has been strongly correlated with multiple myeloma and large B-cell lymphoma; and less strongly correlated with melanoma, leukemia, and colon, rectal, bladder and kidney cancers. There is ongoing dispute over its association with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, despite the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s classification of the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans” and thousands of lawsuits brought by victims, many with multimillion dollar jury awards for adverse health effects.
Glyphosate also has numerous neurological effects. It crosses the blood-brain barrier and triggers a type of inflammation implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. A 2022 review found effects including, in humans, elevated risk of autism from childhood exposures and, in rodents, anxiety, impaired working memory, decreased curiosity, decreased movement, and other problems. It can be a source of inflammation-related pain. See Beyond Pesticides August 31, 2023 Daily News post, “Study Finds Glyphosate Exposure Among the General Population Poses a Risk to Neurological Health” for further detail.
Mr. Donahue’s New York Times reporting does not occur in a vacuum. New Brunswick has been struggling with the issue of pesticides for some time. First Nation groups have been pressuring governments to reduce or eliminate pesticide use, especially in areas where they continue to forage for food. Many are reluctant to forage in clearcuts, knowing that the cuts have been sprayed with glyphosate.
A few steps have been taken by government agencies. In 2019, the province reduced aerial glyphosate spraying along power lines in certain areas. In June 2021—during the same time period when the disease cluster was being dismissed by provincial authorities—a New Brunswick legislative committee held hearings on further controlling glyphosate use on paper plantations and blueberry farms. Its report calling for new restrictions was tabled. Indigenous people were not included in the testimony until one of the First Nation leaders made an unscheduled appearance. As of this writing, there does not appear to be any new law regulating pesticide use in New Brunswick.
In 2022, Dr. Marrero sent 101 samples from his cluster to a lab in Quebec, which had officially recognized a connection between glyphosate and increased risk for Parkinson’s in 2021. Ninety percent of his samples had elevated blood levels of glyphosate. One reached 15,000 times the limit of detection. Pesticide levels in New Brunswick’s general population do not appear to be available, so there was no control group. Health Canada’s biomonitoring program includes glyphosate, but the public-facing dashboard does not break the data down by province or provide interpretation.
From this point on, the investigation of the potential cluster and its possible explanations was rapidly derailed by intergovernmental turf wars in which one combatant was determined to make the problem go away. Within 20 months of the federal investigative study startup, the project was shut down by provincial authorities. They manipulated certain guidelines of scientific inquiry to arrive at conclusions favorable to the parties that might be responsible for the disease cluster. The footprint of industry appears in silhouette: its influence is not acknowledged in the official discourse, but its outline is visible in the shape of the provincial government’s behavior.
According to Mr. Donahue’s article, in an email circulated to provincial participants on May 6, the New Brunswick health authority “paused” the federal study and its working group to have the provincial health department “delve more deeply into existing data.” Ten days later, Dr Marrero was instructed by the province to stop reporting cases to the province, on instructions from “higher up.” New Brunswick officials’ internal communications show they were trying to keep the investigation from involving the federal people. For example, to prevent the project from being “multijurisdictional,” they eliminated two victims from the cluster who had moved out of New Brunswick.
There is an information gap here suggesting that the province wanted to retain control because it believed the federal agencies would not be sufficiently sensitive to the economic impacts of any admission that environmental exposures to chemicals used in forestry and agriculture could be causing the problems.
Second, the New Brunswick cases included numerous households with multiple victims who were not genetically related, suggesting that a common external exposure was likely, yet the provincial health authorities eliminated any search for a toxicant—this despite the widespread adoption among scientists of the term “exposome” to encompass the thousands of environmental substances that leave their marks on humans and the biosphere.
Third, the provincial health authorities failed to consider that the causes of symptoms that occur in multiple diseases may originate farther back in the causal chain than they have looked. For example, see Beyond Pesticides’ post “Research Links Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Disease with Chemical Effects on Brain and Gut,” which details the efforts of University of Rochester neurologist E. Ray Dorsey, M.D. to follow up on evidence that Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia may be the same disease,...
The federal scientists appear to disagree with the province’s conclusions. Michael Coulthart, PhD, head of the federal surveillance system for CJD, said, “My scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in [New Brunswick] that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist.” He, too, thought there must be “an environmental trigger.”
Dr. Marrero now has 430 patients with undiagnosable conditions, and 111 of them are under 45. Thirty-nine have died. New Brunswick, Dr. Marrero says, is the center of one of the largest dementia clusters in young people in the world.
The New Brunswick victims join a long line of populations whose sacrifice to industry has been abetted by captured experts and government officials who define their investigations in such a way as to eliminate consideration of vast amounts of relevant evidence. Victims usually have to endure years of suffering and effort, self-funding testing and further study, before accumulating the political influence to change the direction of a regulatory apparatus that grinds far too slowly toward justice.