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A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

bbc.com

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Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#11

Post by ggm »

Part of the concern is the structural opposition to clarity in a response. I don't know if this runs along party lines, or interpersonal relationships, or a state/national funding issue in public health, but something about how the problem was handled and public trust has gone badly wrong.

It's entirely possible as for cancer clusters there is no single causative agent. That stuff demands really careful thoughtful handling, not just brush-offs. Getting the public past personal experiences to epidemiology and subsequently things like mental health, is very hard.

Look at ME and what post covid syndrome showed.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#12

Post by Sevrene »

alephnerd wrote: post #2

Deep dive into New Brunswick, JD Irving, and their ongoing issues with Glyphosate pollution. Canadian researchers specializing on CJD have been blocked from investigating this case [0]. Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature. The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a…

>untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.

This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#14

Post by alephnerd »

Sevrene wrote: post #12
alephnerd wrote: post #2

Deep dive into New Brunswick, JD Irving, and their ongoing issues with Glyphosate pollution. Canadian researchers specializing on CJD have been blocked from investigating this case [0]. Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature. The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a…

>untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature. This is an odd sentence to me, I assume there’s some reasoning under there that makes sense to the writer, but it doesn’t follow to me. It feels ‘just so’ to me, like there more to this than simply they can’t do anything because parliament.

Margins in the House of Commons have been paper thin for decades, and this gives inordinate power for MPs to threaten a no-confidence motion behind closed doors.

In a province like NB where most politicians from both parties either solicits donations from Irving or are former Irving careerists(eg. the former Premier Higgs who was Irving's CFO), it gives Irving's leadership an inordinate amount of power.

My relative who owns a construction business would do something similar in Punjabi heavy ridings in BC as well - he's become fairly prominent in the Gurdawara and Mandir circuit, and because most older Punjabi Canadian voters don't really follow English language news (and in some cases cannot even speak English), they tend to defer to the candidate and party that the Gurdawara or Mandir committee makes a hukumnama for. In ridings across much of BC, there are enough of these kinds of Punjabi voters (Sikh and Hindu) that MPs will try to co-opt these committees to become their de facto enforcers for the community.

Eric Adams in NYC used similar immigrant machine politics which landed him on the FBI radar, because the old country's intel organizations continue to monitor their diasporas, and oftentimes leverage them tactically, which led him to being caught in the dragnet due to two separate investigations into Turkish [0] and Chinese [1] influence ops in NYC.

[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/nyregion/eric-adams-brian...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/adams-china-camp...

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#15

Post by closewith »

ggm wrote: post #11

Part of the concern is the structural opposition to clarity in a response. I don't know if this runs along party lines, or interpersonal relationships, or a state/national funding issue in public health, but something about how the problem was handled and public trust has gone badly wrong. It's entirely possible as for cancer clusters there is no single causative agent. That stuff demands really careful thoughtful ha…

What did ME and what post covid syndrome show?

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#16

Post by jjmarr »

_zagj wrote: post #8

I watched a documentary about Morgellons, and the patients would often seem quite reasonable at first, but the more they spoke, and the more they described their symptoms, the crazier they sounded. One patient, whose brother, ironically, was a physician (and one skeptical of Morgellons as anything other than delusional parasitosis), seemed earnest, if intense, in describing how Morgellons had destroyed his quality of…

This disease is different because its main symptom is dementia.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#17

Post by AmbroseBierce »

dyauspitr wrote: post #5
alephnerd wrote: post #2

Deep dive into New Brunswick, JD Irving, and their ongoing issues with Glyphosate pollution. Canadian researchers specializing on CJD have been blocked from investigating this case [0]. Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature. The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a…

If it was glyphosates, this would be a much more widespread problem. Roundup/glyphosates are used extensively all across the US and we would be seeing similar statistics everywhere.

You are assuming a simple direct causation, instead it could be a reaction of glyphosate with something else in their bodies that they have inhaled from the air (or from their food), perhaps a heavy metal (given those are mentioned in TFA)

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#18

Post by zug_zug »

A bit of a messy situation, since there is both documented precedent for undisclosed chemical use to cause severe population illness (e.g. numerous times in "cancer alley"), however there is also precedent for charismatic doctors to create a cult of personality that might create noise.
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