Canada|Many high-level researchers are of the opinion that the new brain disease should be investigated, even though the authorities think it is nothing out of the ordinary.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
Researchers say authorities are blocking research into a new type of brain disease in Canada.
According to the local health authorities, the disease is neither new nor exceptional.
The interviewed researchers and authorities also disagree about, among other things, the number of diagnoses that fit the disease picture.
At least two high-level Canadian researchers claim the Canadian government is blocking research into a mysterious brain disease plaguing the country, reports a British newspaper The Guardian.
In eastern Canada, the province of New Brunswick has since at least 2021 since investigated an unknown brain disease that allegedly causes memory loss, hallucinations and muscle atrophy, among other things.
In a leaked email seen by The Guardian, a neuroscientist working for the Canadian federal government, Prof Samuel Weiss says that the country’s government deliberately tried to prevent a more thorough investigation of the disease.
Professor Weiss was still optimistic in the spring of 2021 that the cause of the disease would be clarified with sufficient funding, until, according to him, the funding was suddenly stopped at the behest of provincial and federal authorities in the middle of the year.
According to Weiss, symptoms matching the disease picture have been found in about 350 people, although only 40 of them had been officially identified in 2021.
of New Brunswick an oversight committee set up by the provincial health authorities reviewed 48 medical records possibly related to the case.
According to the authorities, no common, related symptoms were found in the cases. According to the province, a large number of patients were misdiagnosed, and instead of a new disease, they were diagnosed with cancer or dementia, for example.
However, emails seen by The Guardian show that many senior researchers are not convinced.
Posted in October 2023 in a leaked email A microbiologist working for the federal government of Canada Michael Coulthart says he was replaced as head of a federal group investigating the disease. He believes that the reason for his change was political.
According to Coulthart, the disease is neurologically complex and its features do not fit easily into “narrow” paradigms of diagnostic pathology. According to him, politicians hide behind the complexity of the disease.
“My scientific opinion is that there is something really going on in New Brunswick that cannot be explained solely by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist,” Coulthart wrote in an email seen by The Guardian.
“It would be possible to explain a few cases that way, but there are too many now, more than 200.”
Of the disease the allegedly suffering 23-year-old Gabrielle’s Mum Stacie Quigley Cormier commented to The Guardian that his daughter suffers from an extremely rare neuropathy that is normally found in old men.
The family believes that the cause of Gabrielle’s unexplained neurological symptoms would be an external, environmental factor, perhaps some chemicals.
“I don’t feel that the authorities have forgotten us, but that we have been deliberately forgotten,” says Cormier.
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