2025-02-062:1913089www.ctvnews.ca
The New Brunswick government has reopened an investigation into a mystery brain disease that seems to mostly affect people living in the Acadian Peninsula and Moncton areas.
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By TriangleEdge 2025-02-064:353 reply Context: Moncton is built on a swamp. It has _a lot_ of mosquitoes during summer and 3 to 5 ft of snow during winter. It had (has?) the lowest home prices in all of Canada because of this. NB also has the lowest income per family (or next to lowest, Nunavut might be lower).
MS is more common in northern climates as well, but afaik it's not higher than average in NB.
Source: I have spent quite a bit of time in Moncton.
By itsoktocry 2025-02-0612:301 reply >It had (has?) the lowest home prices in all of Canada because of this.
When was this? Moncton is the biggest and fastest growing city in New Brunswick.
By Marsymars 2025-02-0623:23 And Moncton/Saint John/Fredericton all have pretty comparable prices.
I really wish we could bioengineer mosquitoes and ticks to not bite humans.
By morkalork 2025-02-0615:31 Behold, man made horrors beyond comprehension! Must be like "I have no mouth and must scream" for the poor mosquito.
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1grpkok/...
I wish we could bioengineer mosquitoes and ticks to not bite humans, and dress it up with a thin veneer of being natural so that you felt happy about it too.
Why is that? What do you fear so much?
Let me let you into something: There will always be something to fear, and the more you go trying to squash every little bug the more something else will find you. You can’t escape your fear of pain and death no matter how much you think you are god and must alter the universe around you to stay “safe”.
Before meddling in the intricacies of nature for an illusion of safety, the best course is the ancient adage:
Know thyself.
How do you feel about vaccines, for instance? They kind of interfere with nature. We ought to be infected instead, right, because it's natural?
Or do you draw a line between bacteria and insects for some reason? If the ticks are left unaltered but we eradicate the lyme disease bacteria (and the typhus bacteria, and the Q-fever bacteria, and the other seven or so diseases ticks can spread) is that alright?
By 52-6F-62 2025-02-1020:54 Sounds like you’re moving the goal posts here.
You were proposing bioengineering another species of animal to limit its capacity for survival and cooperation in a complex ecosystem well beyond your capacity (or all of humanity’s capacity) of fully understanding.
That kind of hubris has ripple effects across the world that we cannot possibly predict. Like clearcutting old growth forest it’s incredibly short sighted.
By trod1234 2025-02-069:25 In 2019, the conclusion for this question by medical professionals was maybe for mosquitoes, but definitely for arthropods like ticks.
By sandworm101 2025-02-0616:19 Anything that pokes into one mammal and then into another might be able to transmit basically anything. This is why doctors dont reuse needles no matter the percieved risk.
By thih9 2025-02-067:50 Moving out seems to help - wild.
> The couple moved to a new town — Canaan Station, N.B. — and Nesbitt made lifestyle and dietary changes. Nesbitt has also started playing video games to improve hand-eye coordination. “There are some things that are still regressing or still degenerating, but many of the symptoms have started to relieve themselves,” she said.
> She still has seizures and tremors, but they’re not as bad or frequent. She’s also able to stand for longer than a “couple of minutes,” and the nerve tingling on one side of her body is not as frequent.
Been following this on and off and it's pretty strange generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_neurological_syn... && https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...
By userbinator 2025-02-064:171 reply From your first link:
symptoms such as "rapidly progressing dementia", unusual weight loss, "tightening of the muscles", uncoordinated gait, and muscle atrophy
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate-induced_delaye...
By tpoacher 2025-02-0612:33 Given other comments on this thread regarding large densities of mosquitoes, this might actually make sense if large amounts of insecticides are used in the region.
By inverted_flag 2025-02-064:131 reply > The CJDSS ruled out any prion disorder, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)
Thank god.
That was my knee-jerk scenario to think of too - especially given the rising prevalence of Chronic Wasting Disease in the US states near that part of Canada.
It's notable that the CJDSS director said they ruled out "known forms of prion disease" specifically, and the neuropathologist Jansen stated "no evidence for a prion disease was found" - I think the sentence you're quoting is actually misleading because it seems to suggest that there is negative evidence for a prion disorder, which there is not.
Seems like it would be exceedingly difficult, bordering on impossible, to make a categorical negative finding that there's no possibility of prions because you'd have to have a test to detect any misfolded protein at all.
I am not a medical professional, so take this opinion with a grain of salt, but it seems like it should theoretically be possible to test for a concentration of misfolded proteins that propagate themselves.
How complex or expensive this could be is not something I have any insight into at all, it could be something that takes millions of dollars and 20 years per test.
By rtkwe 2025-02-0616:34 Only for ones that bind to the proteins in your testing apparatus though. If this hypothetical new prion doesn't bind to the slate of proteins in the test it wouldn't show anything. Unless there's an easy way to detect the fibrils they form more easily and generally.
By Mistletoe 2025-02-0615:44 > Jansen presented his findings to 20 to 30 colleagues in which he suggested that the eight patients previously diagnosed with the novel neurological syndrome, "represent a group of misclassified clinical diagnoses", and that they "died from a variety of causes, including cancer, Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer's disease"
It seems this isn’t that complex of a case really though? Upon autopsy they just had normal issues.
