Leaked Memo Reveals Concerning New Brain Disease In Canada (theguardian.com) 102
hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.
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Did he try to explain the reason for the secrecy?
In general, governments shouldn't lie and mislead their own people.
In this case, it seems particularly harmful since uninformed people are less likely to report symptoms or take preventative measures.
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Suggests to me there's a high-profile commercial/industrial/governmental research/manufacturing/disposal facility in the area that they're afraid will instantly get blamed regardless of fault.
Which, admittedly does make me feel near certain of their fault but I have to remind myself that's not rational to do so without further evidence... ... which they've just suppressed. Fuck, I don't want to think about this anymore. Time to get high.
Re:Why is this surprising? Trudeau just slipped ag (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Why is this surprising? Trudeau just slipped a (Score:1)
Sure, they are, but it wasn't China who made those suggestions initially, China just mentioned them as alternatives to the largely circumstantial evidence that it origated in Wuhan, not as proof that it didn't. Like most good conspiracy theories, they're entirely plausible, and just labelling them as "conspiracy" and "theory" does not lessen the possibility of them being true.
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Well, when these conspiracy theories are now being touted by Anthony Blinken, Biden's secretary of state, then there may actually be something to it.
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Well, there's your problem.... you are relying on Murdoch Media
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is THIS the long-awaited side-effect of the corona string that crosses the blood-brain barrier ?
kicking the chinese is fashionable lately
who's gonna adapt faster
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Re: Why is this surprising? Trudeau just slipped a (Score:2)
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Are people seriously this stupid? Or is this one trolling?
Maybe English isn't his first language? If so, I'll excuse it.
What mystery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that somewhere nearby you'll find a cow or cows with CJD.
Or deer with chronic wasting disease [wikipedia.org] which is also caused by prions.
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To the point where the deer population is extremely low around there; there have been hunting bans on female deer and draws for limited licenses of bucks for decades up there.
Re: What mystery? (Score:2)
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That's because of the limited licenses and government restrictions. The problem is deer reproduce like rabbits if there is no natural predators. Unless they start introducing and have thriving, large packs of wolves and other top predators, you'll have a deer problem.
I live in an area like that as well, one ecologist activist "miscounts" and the government start throwing up bans to "save nature" which inevitably leads to deer eating the bark and sprouts of all the healthy and young trees causing an ecologic
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I used to live in Southern NB (Gagetown area), where deer were plentiful, and moose much rarer. I have lived in northern NB near Miramichi now for 26 years, and the deer population has remained so low here that deer sightings, and sightings of deer spoor, are very rare, whilst moose are much more in evidence. A large herd of deer do live in a woodlot IN the city (Chatham area), as there is no hunting allowed within city limits, so if I want to deer I can do it by driving 24 KM into town and go look at the
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IIUC, prions are not a persistent poison in an external environment. They depend on the cells of an organism supplying the proteins that they fold in their desired manner. In the wild they should be quickly eaten by bacteria.
But although that mentions soil, it doesn't talk about
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the wild they should be quickly eaten by bacteria.
How is that compatible with prions being extremely difficult to sterilize from instruments? Whatever is eatable by bacteria should be easy to destroy considering that bacteria can't involve extreme processes to break stuff down. But we know prions to be very stable.
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Just guessing: Enzymes.
E.g. when I boil an egg, it stays in compact form regardless of my boiling of it. Yet the egg dissolves within me, even though I am much colder than a boiling water.
Re:What mystery? (Score:4, Insightful)
IIUC, prions are not a persistent poison in an external environment.
I don't think this is correct. The Wikipedia article on CWD says the prions can persist in the soil.
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently Prions can even be absorbed by plants that grow on the contaminated ground, resulting in infection of those eating the plants:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK, that would be a way of persisting, though not in the soil. They could use the proteins made by the plant to fold into their favorite shape. Or you could sterilze the soil, and then prions could presist, as most of them are relatively stable as long as nothing eats them.
P.S.: Just so you understand:
Prions are essential to life. What prions are is a self-catalytic protein shape. We depend on prions to shape the proteins that we use into the shapes we need them to have. But just occasionally one form
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Informative)
IIUC, prions are not a persistent poison in an external environment. They depend on the cells of an organism supplying the proteins that they fold in their desired manner. In the wild they should be quickly eaten by bacteria.
Sorry, but nope. It's the opposite.
The linked article states that prions are persistent, NOT eaten by bacteria or broken down in the soil, even for years. Actually, that and disease transmission are the points of the article – animal-to-soil-to-plant-to-animal disease transmission is a real thing. The last sentence of the abstract says it.
It's scary. Mammal-to-plant-to-mammal transmission of disease particles that do not break down in the soil.
Check the titles of the papers that reference this one for more fright. . .
Re:What mystery? (Score:4, Informative)
https://journals.plos.org/plos... [plos.org]
Yup. More than scary, Scientific American. (Score:1)
The title of the Scientific American article explains it all: Prions are Forever [scientificamerican.com]
It's impossible to sterilize surgical steel contaminated with prions. Or kill them with chemicals. Somebody can be exposed to them and they lie dormant in the victim for years. Animals drop them via feces into the soil where they never break down. So infected deer have been transmitting it everywhere.
The symptoms are not far from those of zombie stories. Since they don't lose their lethality when binding to soil particles they c
Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that somewhere nearby you'll find a cow or cows with CJD.
Or deer with chronic wasting disease [wikipedia.org] which is also caused by prions.
my father died from CJD back in the early 2010s he was one of apx 30 canadians who die from CJD every year. It's a fucking horrid thing to witness. CJD is the human version of Mad Cow Disease not the other way around. After he died it was mandatory that he be cremated at a much higher temperature than a normal cremation temp in order to make sure every possible contaminant was killed. The crazy thing was that he was in Britain in the 1980s during the MadCow outbreak, no specialists have been able to connect the two because of all the years that had passed (30?). but, possibly like lung cancer and other diseases in the elderly things lay dormant until late in life when the immune system isn't as healthy. Possibly he did ingest something years ago that lay dormant until old age? What is clear is that there is no cure and it's nasty and kills within months of diagnosis, there is NO survival.
Re:What mystery? (Score:5)
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Pretty much. The question needs to be asked can mad cow prions be detected in the soil?? I they persist then they would still be there. But it could be proactive to test soils randomly. If not to understand the origination of prions.
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Re:What mystery? (Score:5, Informative)
It came to light in August 2019 that prior to 2014 in Canada, all animals on CWD-infected farms were buried or incinerated. But in a mysterious change of policy, since then the CFIA has allowed animals from CWD-infected farms to enter the food chain because there is "no national requirement to have animals tested for the disease". From one CWD-infected herd in Alberta, 131 elk were sold for human consumption
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Hope it's better than cow nose soup, that's just greasy, chewy and utterly tasteless.
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There was an older theory that mad cow started out as mad moose disease.
Re:What mystery? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah here's a frightening piece of potentially salient information from the prion wiki page:
It came to light in August 2019 that prior to 2014 in Canada, all animals on CWD-infected farms were buried or incinerated. But in a mysterious change of policy, since then the CFIA has allowed animals from CWD-infected farms to enter the food chain because there is "no national requirement to have animals tested for the disease". From one CWD-infected herd in Alberta, 131 elk were sold for human consumption
That's a rather twisted flavor of corruption that takes a health and safety policy from burn-the-farm-at-the-stake to nothing-to-see-or-test-here, in a matter of a few years.
The "mysterious" one, should be brought to trial. And it shouldn't be that damn hard to figure out whodunnit. Government is still damn good at killing trees in the name of paperwork jobs in triplicate. A policy change like that, should have a paper trail...
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2014 would have been during the Harper years. His Conservative government was furiously getting rid of regulations. At one point they deregulated the meat plants so they self inspected, resulting in deaths and our trading partners no longer accepting our meat. Sometimes regulation is needed as businesses self policing just doesn't seem to work.
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Even that's not really fixing anything. Those animals that are sick have been crapping everywhere in the environment leaving prions behind for another animal to find years later including humans.
Re: What mystery? (Score:2)
Iirc, in the UK it was quite similar to a disease called "scrapie" which was in sheep.
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Scrapie is most likely in all sheep all over the world. It has been known about since 1732.
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April Fools? (Score:1)
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Possibly a marine toxin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Possibly a marine toxin (Score:4, Insightful)
In the tropics you've got ciguatera poisoning caused by a dinoflagellates; there's no doubt many other marine organisms out there capable of producing human disease that have either not been discovered or have not heretofore gotten into the human food chain.
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Cyanobacteria growing on invasive water-thyme(Hydrilla verticillat that super-accumulates bromine) create neurotoxins with that element (comes from some weed killers, misc. anthropogenic, and natural sources.) They're toxic to all sorts of aquatic organisms and raptors that prey on them as well. Investigation on toxicity to mammals is planned. (URL: https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]).
I remember reading the BMAA related articles a whiles back, (URL: https://academic.oup.com/toxsc... [oup.com])
It's a confounded probl
Prions? (Score:2)
Could be a prion disease (like Kuru in Papua New Guinea). Are they eating human brains up there, by chance?
abnormal jerking (Score:2)
> "Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking..."
This disease appears to be targeting teens!
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Zombie disease (Score:2)
We know what causes it: (Score:1)
Feeding livestock the ground-up bones and brains of the corpses of that ssme livestock.
And feeding humans the resulting BSE livestock.
It was the entire problem during the BSE crisis.
Doesn't anyone remember this?
Find the bastards who fed their livestock that crap. And jail them for mass-murder.
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Whoooo, craaap. CJD is really scary! (Score:2)
CJD is presumed to only transfer from infected animal meat to humans. If they've found something like CJD that transfers from humans to humans, this is nightmare material. Think Ebola, but specialised on screwing up brain tissue in record speeds. A zombie maker disease. Not fun, scary as hell.
Re: Whoooo, craaap. CJD is really scary! (Score:2)
Prion disease was first DISCOVERED by human to to human transmission, ie the natives in NG eating the brains of other humans
BSE - Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Score:5, Informative)
There is some interesting background on BSE to be found here [wikipedia.org].
The linked Wikipedia article includes the following:-
"Alan Colchester, a professor of neurology at the University of Kent, and Nancy Colchester, writing in the 3 September 2005 issue of the medical journal The Lancet, proposed a theory that the most likely initial origin of BSE in the United Kingdom was the importation from the Indian Subcontinent of bone meal which contained CJD-infected human remains."
I came across a slightly different theory, which is as follows:-
In order to accelerate the growth of cattle - primarily beef cattle raised for human consumption, but also for dairy herds - farmers include "cattle cakes" in the diet of their herds, like this [blogspot.com]. These cattle cakes are, in fact, the leftover remains of slaughtered beef cattle, ground up in to bonemeal. The ingredients are not selectively filtered, so they include not just skeletal bones, but all parts of the slaughtered animal, including the brains and spinal column. This is undisputed and a practice that has been going on for decades.
In the UK, the epicenter of the outbreak in the late 1980s, the government department responsible for regulation of farming (I think it might have been known as the "Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food", or MAFF, at the time), changed a rule concerning the creation of "cattle cake". The changed reduced the amount of time that the bonemeal cakes had to be "cooked", reducing the energy cost of producing the foodstuff and thereby reducing the production costs for the manufacturers.
As a result, if a pathogen existed in the brain or spinal column of a steer that was slaughtered for beef, then when that animal's remains were recycled as "cattle cakes", the pathogen may survive the cooking process and re-enter the food chain when the cake was fed to the next generation of cattle. The UK looked at a number of other contributing factors, for example such as the possibility that infected brain or spinal column material could be spread as a fine mist in an abattoir given that typically a bovine carcass is cut up using a purpose-build band-saw.
Unfortunately, it could take several iterative generations of feeding animals on tainted cattle cakes before any pathogen reached sufficient concentrations in the host animal for them to develop symptoms (which in cows included passing out, an inability to stand or to appear "drunk" when walking, followed, ultimately, by collapse and death).
As I understand it, the British government quietly reverse the rules on "cooking" cattle cakes and over a period of time the disease was wiped out. There was never any form of public admission as to the cause; rather there was enough speculation and alternative theories to allow the story to be left as "cause not conclusively determined".
Obviously I need to emphasize that there's nothing in the linked Guardian article to suggest that this has anything to do with BSE or the diets of the individuals concerned. Although the UK's experience is now some 30-35 years ago, there's a pretty good chance that Canadian authorities will include at least one medical professional who lived through those times and will recall the same background I set out here. That, in turn, could prompt them to chase down the source.
And if I'm wrong and it's not related to food chain, then we've just encountered yet another new pathogen... It really feels as though the pace of emergence is accelerating.
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You have not been allowed to feed "cattle cakes" as you put it to cattle since 1996 in the UK. The whole process was completely banned.
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Let's hope that whatever has happened in Canada is localized and has minimal impact.
Obligatory Good Friday Comment (Score:2)
"Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes."
It looks like the church may have been right about the dangers of too much whacking off.
I knew it! (Score:1, Troll)
The moment I saw that Trudeau guy I knew that was another case of 'clown president syndrome'. Or closest thing to president they've got there.
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The mining is atrocious and polluting but that's more in the center.
Seeing as how it's the coast I'd say a likely guess is climate change affecting algae blooms affecting seafood.
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Seeing as how it's the coast I'd say a likely guess is climate change affecting algae blooms affecting seafood.
Sure, gotta find some way to work climate change in there.
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The easily observable warming since 1850 clearly makes life today suck.
Carry on.
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Canadian Cannibals! (Score:4, Funny)
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Q: Why do they call it PMS?
A: Mad Cow Disease was already taken.
Don't eat zombie-deer (Score:3)
Unfortunately not a joke.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Small Nuclear Reactors (Score:1)