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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

#51

Post by nucleardog »

whatsupdog wrote: post #43
hedayet wrote: post #33

I was diagnosed with a mysterious tachycardia last year, coincidental to this headline: while I was living in Canada. At one point I checked into the ER with a resting heart rate around 200 BPM, and on some days my smartwatch couldn’t even detect a pulse because it was racing so fast. I eventually recovered-though I still avoid wearing smart devices because seeing my heart rate triggers anxiety-but the whole period e…

How many COVID shots did you get? I noticed my resting heart rate go up after the first one. So I never got another one.

When your immune system activity increases, generally so does your heart rate. It's fairly common to get sick and have an increased heart rate. A quick search for "heart rate when sick" will turn up a number of results explaining this, the mechanisms behind it, and more.

Sorry you missed out on simple, effective preventative health measures because of this misunderstanding.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#52

Post by XorNot »

_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…

> However, one could very well imagine an infectious disease, with or without a dermatological component, causing delusional parasitosis.

Except what's more likely is that it's just psychological - which doesn't mean it doesn't have physiological treatments, it's just going to be for the psyche issue though.

Put it another way: it's well recognized eating disorders exist. But they're psychological disorders: they respond to psychological interventions and treatments, and are curable, but can also "spread" in viral like ways - i.e. an eating disorder can be induced by environmental (peer group) factors.

We don't generally posit that a virus spreads eating disorders, nor has any evidence of one been identified. And so in the same way, there's no reason to think Morgellons should have any underlying pathological cause that's any different, since none has been identified but we are aware of a number of psychological self-harm disorders (which can be amplified or spread sociologically but also just be unusual presentations of other conditions).

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#53

Post by culi »

tptacek wrote: post #42
culi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably referring to the different salts (isopropylamine (IPA), potassium, or diammonium) which can greatly affect absorption and effectiveness

Roundup is IPA, Touchdown is DAM. Both extremely common.

Yeah both glyphosate.

But the doctor in the OP explicitly pointed out that they had increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:

> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...

Just because glyphosate is everywhere doesn't mean it can't be concentrated in a particular place.

To be clear I'm not taking a stand for the glyphosate argument at all. I just don't think your line of reasoning is a fair counterargument in this case

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#54

Post by Retz4o4 »

whatsupdog wrote: post #43
hedayet wrote: post #33

I was diagnosed with a mysterious tachycardia last year, coincidental to this headline: while I was living in Canada. At one point I checked into the ER with a resting heart rate around 200 BPM, and on some days my smartwatch couldn’t even detect a pulse because it was racing so fast. I eventually recovered-though I still avoid wearing smart devices because seeing my heart rate triggers anxiety-but the whole period e…

How many COVID shots did you get? I noticed my resting heart rate go up after the first one. So I never got another one.

Or Covid itself.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#55

Post by Retz4o4 »

hedayet wrote: post #33

I was diagnosed with a mysterious tachycardia last year, coincidental to this headline: while I was living in Canada. At one point I checked into the ER with a resting heart rate around 200 BPM, and on some days my smartwatch couldn’t even detect a pulse because it was racing so fast. I eventually recovered-though I still avoid wearing smart devices because seeing my heart rate triggers anxiety-but the whole period e…

Covid.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#56

Post by devmor »

This is such a frustrating situation to read about, because it is clear that Dr. Marrero is out of his depth, but it’s also clear that whatever this cluster is - real or imagined - was horribly mismanaged by the health officials in charge.

The fact that the investigation was disbanded simply because the patients had symptoms that can be tied to existing diseases is utterly asinine. As if there’s no reason to investigate why so many people in such a small area have similar conditions, or even to investigate whether or not the demographics of the supposed cluster are out of the ordinary in the first place. Even if there was no related cause at all, such an investigation could be used to determine that Dr. Marrero was the cause of a problem and stop him from doing harm. But instead the result was that no satisfactory conclusion was reached for the majority of people, and the patients continue to suffer.

These people need help and they are being failed by their doctors, their administrative officials and their representatives all at the same time.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#57

Post by Sevrene »

alephnerd wrote: post #14
Sevrene wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 w…

It feels like now you're saying it's not because it's parliament's nature to be like this, but rather these other factors that occure within parliaments and other systems?

Can't you unelect the MPs? Doesn't the paper thin margins increase those odds? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the issue is a parliamentry system, but rather people either aren't aware of the issues (media), or have decided (wrongly or rightly) not to care. Either way I still don't get how that's the parliamentry nature as much as it's the people's. That's kind of the point of these systems.

I don't know enough about Candaian Punjabi dispora to comment about the other stuff.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#58

Post by defrost »

pash wrote: post #46

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks. Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope. Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a s…

If you've not seen it Kuru: The Science and The Sorcery is an interesting documentary of Mike Alpers time in PNG

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJrD1JcmUiE

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Alpers

* https://stmarkscollege.com.au/news/remembering-professor-mic...

As a small person in the 1960s / 1970s I'd go along with my aunts on supply runs to PNG for him and others, I met his family in Perth in the early 1980s

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#59

Post by culi »

throwaway_9879 wrote: post #29

The answer is "nothing" The only common factor between these patients is Dr. Marrero. It is notable that he is not the only physician who works in that clinic, but is the only one diagnosing this condition. The most likely cause is weak diagnostic skills for challenging patients. Unfortunately, a majority of these patients likely have Functional Neurologic Disorder https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conve…

> The committee and the New Brunswick government also cast doubt on the work of neurologist Alier Marrero, who was initially referred dozens of cases by baffled doctors in the region, and subsequently identified more cases. The doctor has since become a fierce advocate for patients he feels have been neglected by the province.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...

It seems to me that it's doctors reaching out to Marrero. It also seems odd that [these|this] illness(es) disproportionately affected young people.

Another article I just read stated Marrero reached out to get second opinions but was blocked.

> He claims he made arrangements in 2020-21 for "subject-matter experts" to travel to New Brunswick to evaluate patients, but the province "chose not to avail itself of this invaluable expertise."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-n...

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#60

Post by matsemann »

Some questions I'm stuck with:

* are all the patients really sick or as sick as the symptoms he documents, or is it some kind of Munchausen induced or lied about by the doctor?

* Or are they all sick, they're just not getting the help they need because he wants to have a mystery disease?

* If they're all sick, is it then a higher prevalence than expected, so even if there is no mystery disease there is still something environmental or similar that should've been explored? Aka, is there a cluster, it's just a known disease?

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