A MYSTERY brain illness that is baffling Canadian doctors has struck down at least 200 people in a small province.
A cluster of residents in New Brunswick have developed an array of symptoms similar to those caused by mad cow disease, also known as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).
The disease that ravaged Britain's cattle herds in the 1990s can in very rare cases cause a fatal brain disease in humans called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD), which causes hallucinations, behavioural changes, loss of coordination, blindness and twitching.
The disease spotted in the Canadian province has caused similar symptoms in a few hundred people, who report suffering from memory problems, muscle spasms, balance issues, difficulty walking or falls, hallucinations, unexplained weight loss, and pain in the limbs.
A few of them have reported being suddenly unable to read.
One victim of the mysterious disease, the now 23-year-old Gabrielle Cormier, has become so debilitated she now needs to use a wheelchair.
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Aged only 20 when she began displaying symptoms three years ago, Gabrielle was no longer able to figure skate and had to leave university.
A whistle-blower last year warned that the illness is increasingly affecting young people.
Its cause has baffled health officials, with the whistle-blower documents showing that hazardous blue-green algae blooming throughout the province could be making people sick.
Neurologist Alier Marrero has also suggested that the weedkiller glyphosate could be behind the cluster of cases affecting "alarmingly young people".
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After the New Brunswick government announced that there was no mystery illness and closed its investigation in February 2022, Dr Marrero pressed for it to be re-opened earlier this year, as reported by the Guardian.
He recently told the podcast Canadaland that the number of being with the debilitating disease had quadrupled, with cases now exceeding 200.
The patients were primarily in two areas of New Brunswick: Moncton and the Acadian Peninsula.
Convinced that environmental toxins were to blame for his patients' degenerative neurological symptoms, Dr Marrero turned to a comprehensive diagnostic test designed in Quebec to measure their exposure to herbicides used in their area.
Dr Marrero told the Canadaland podcast: "So far we've had about 200 patients tested. Initally I didn't know myself that this was available and I thought they only test one substance but in fact they test four."
The four herbicides the diagnostic test can identify are widely used in the province.
"The great majority of my patients show exposure well beyond detection level to one or more of these substances, and sometimes very high," Dr Marrero said.
"I'm talking about people who are not professionally exposed. They're not working in this [agricultural] industry anyway, and this is wintertime."
Though cases of the mysterious disease began being spotted in 2015, they only started picking up media traction in 2021.
Dr Marrero, who is based in Moncton, was the first to spot the symptoms in patients there.
By 2018, he had seen eight cases. By 2019, 20 people were exhibiting the peculiar symptoms, with the number rising to 38 the year after that and to 48 in 2021.
Gabrielle Cormier felt her health take a turn for the worse during her first term at university in September 2019, but doctors in the emergency department couldn't find anything wrong with her.
She was referred to Dr Marrero when she went home that Christmas.
By that time she was having problems with her vision, telling CBC in January 2022: "I literally couldn't read."
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Her symptoms continued to get worse, and she started having trouble with balance and overall mobility.
Though she could manage to walk short distances with the aid of a cane, Gabrielle now depends on a wheelchair.
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