https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-disease-dementia.html

Magazine|They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They're Fighting to
Learn Why.
  
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canada-brain-disease-dementia.html

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A portrait of Gabrielle Cormier.
Gabrielle Cormier was 20 years old when she became the youngest
confirmed case in a mysterious cluster in New Brunswick, Canada.
Credit...Brendan George Ko for The New York Times
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They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They're Fighting to Learn
Why.

Doctors in Canada have identified dozens of patients with similar,
unexplained symptoms -- a scientific puzzle that has now become a
political maelstrom.

Gabrielle Cormier was 20 years old when she became the youngest
confirmed case in a mysterious cluster in New Brunswick, Canada.
Credit...Brendan George Ko for The New York Times

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By Greg Donahue

Greg Donahue is a writer in New York who covers crime, corruption and
politics. He interviewed two dozen doctors, patients and politicians
for this article.

  * Aug. 14, 2024Updated 1:38 p.m. ET

In late 2018, after an otherwise-normal Christmas holiday, Laurie
Beatty started acting strange. An 81-year-old retired contractor, he
grew unnaturally quiet and began poring over old accounting logs from
a construction business he sold decades earlier, convinced that he
had been bilked in the deal.

Listen to this article, read by Robert Petkoff

Over the course of several days, Beatty slipped further into
unreality. He told his wife the year was 1992 and wondered aloud why
his hair had turned white. Then he started having seizures. His arms
began to move in uncontrollable jerks and twitches. By the end of
May, he was dead.

Doctors at the Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Center in
Moncton, the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, Canada,
zeroed in on an exceedingly rare condition -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease, caused by prions, misfolding proteins in the brain -- as the
most likely culprit. The doctors explained this to Beatty's children,
Tim and Jill, and said they would run additional tests to confirm the
post-mortem diagnosis. Three months later, when the siblings returned
to the office of their father's neurologist, Dr. Alier Marrero,
that's what they were expecting to hear. Instead, Marrero told them
that Laurie's Creutzfeldt-Jakob test had come back negative. "We were
all looking at one another," Tim says, "because we were all very
confused." If Creutzfeldt-Jakob hadn't killed their father, then what
had? What Marrero said next was even more unsettling.

"There's something going on," they recall him saying. "And I don't
know what it is."

ImageA portrait of Dr. Alier Marrero.
Dr. Alier Marrero, a neurologist, reported more than 20 cases to a
national monitoring program in Canada early in the outbreak.Credit...
Brendan George Ko for The New York Times

It turned out that Laurie Beatty was just one of many local residents
who had gone to Marrero's office exhibiting similar, inexplicable
symptoms of neurological decline -- more than 20 in the previous four
years. The first signs were often behavioral. One patient fell asleep
for nearly 20 hours straight before a friend took her to the
hospital; another found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who
had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the
stranger was his wife.

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