One of World’s Largest Dementia Clusters in Young People May Be Tied to High Blood Levels of Glyphosate

(Beyond Pesticides, September 3, 2024) A piercing investigative article in the August 14 New York Times

by Beyond Pesticides

(Beyond Pesticides, September 3, 2024) A piercing investigative article in the August 14 New York Times by journalist Greg Donahue reveals the abandonment of a group of brain disease patients in an area of Canada with forestry management for paper products, agriculture, and large amounts of pesticide use, including glyphosate. It illustrates the tension in the relationship between government authorities, regulated industries, and neurologist (physician) on the front lines. The article details the manner in which health officials appeared to manipulate their own investigation of a disease cluster to make it less disruptive to the economy of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. (This Beyond Pesticides analysis, where not otherwise indicated, draws on Mr. Donahue’s article.)

New Brunswick has one major town, Moncton, and a large rural area characterized by agriculture and forestry. The province’s agriculture industry is dominated by blueberry production, which occupies the fourth largest amount of agricultural land in New Brunswick. About half the province is forested, with increasing amounts of land devoted to tree plantations intended for paper production.

Glyphosate is hands-down the most heavily used pesticide in New Brunswick forestry, and New Brunswick is second only to Ontario in Canada’s total area of glyphosate-treated forest. The herbicide is especially heavily used in clearcuts and tree plantations.

Glyphosate’s innocence, assumed for decades since it entered the market in 1974, has been thoroughly disproved. According to a comprehensive 2020 review, it is toxic to cells; disrupts hormones and gut microbe balance; contributes to non-alcoholic liver disease; may trigger heart arrhythmias; has been strongly correlated with multiple myeloma and large B-cell lymphoma; and less strongly correlated with melanoma, leukemia, and colon, rectal, bladder and kidney cancers. There is ongoing dispute over its association with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, despite the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s classification of the herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans” and thousands of lawsuits brought by victims, many with multimillion dollar jury awards for adverse health effects.

Glyphosate also has numerous neurological effects. It crosses the blood-brain barrier and triggers a type of inflammation implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. A 2022 review found effects including, in humans, elevated risk of autism from childhood exposures and, in rodents, anxiety, impaired working memory, decreased curiosity, decreased movement, and other problems. It can be a source of inflammation-related pain. See Beyond Pesticides August 31, 2023 Daily News post, “Study Finds Glyphosate Exposure Among the General Population Poses a Risk to Neurological Health” for further detail.

Paraquat has also been used extensively in Canada. A class action lawsuit was filed August 15 in Canada for compensation to victims of Gramoxone, whose active ingredient is paraquat. The herbicide is no longer used in Canada and is banned in 32 other countries (but still used in the U.S.). The Canadian litigation aims to achieve justice for victims all the way back to paraquat’s introduction in 1962.

The neurological cases came from both Moncton and the rural Acadian Peninsula. As the cases emerged, the victims consulted a neurologist, Alier Marrero, M.D., for help with problems typical of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For example, in 2018, an 81-year-old man became very quiet. He thought it was 1992. He obsessed over a decades-old business transaction in which he believed he had been cheated. Then he began having seizures and died the next month. Other victims had a variety of similar problems, including limb pain, balance problems, teeth chattering, muscle spasms, impaired vision, hallucinations, and muscle wasting. Some patients died; others became stuck in zombie-like states. At this point, Dr. Marrero had seen more than 20 cases and eight people had died. Marrero suspected a common environmental exposure, perhaps an entirely new disease.

New Brunswick hospital doctors told the 81-year-old’s children their father had Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which is caused by misfolding proteins in the brain called prions. It is very rare. According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, there are about 350 cases of CJD annually in the U.S. The doctors conducted further tests on the man’s brain. Three months later they told his children it was not CJD. They did not provide an alternative diagnosis.

Mr. Donahue’s New York Times reporting does not occur in a vacuum. New Brunswick has been struggling with the issue of pesticides for some time. First Nation groups have been pressuring governments to reduce or eliminate pesticide use, especially in areas where they continue to forage for food. Many are reluctant to forage in clearcuts, knowing that the cuts have been sprayed with glyphosate.

A few steps have been taken by government agencies. In 2019, the province reduced aerial glyphosate spraying along power lines in certain areas. In June 2021—during the same time period when the disease cluster was being dismissed by provincial authorities—a New Brunswick legislative committee held hearings on further controlling glyphosate use on paper plantations and blueberry farms. Its report calling for new restrictions was tabled. Indigenous people were not included in the testimony until one of the First Nation leaders made an unscheduled appearance. As of this writing, there does not appear to be any new law regulating pesticide use in New Brunswick.

In 2022, Dr. Marrero sent 101 samples from his cluster to a lab in Quebec, which had officially recognized a connection between glyphosate and increased risk for Parkinson’s in 2021. Ninety percent of his samples had elevated blood levels of glyphosate. One reached 15,000 times the limit of detection. Pesticide levels in New Brunswick’s general population do not appear to be available, so there was no control group. Health Canada’s biomonitoring program includes glyphosate, but the public-facing dashboard does not break the data down by province or provide interpretation.

Dr. Marrero had been reporting his cases to Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System. He found support there and in the Canadian federal health agency. In March 2021, a memo to local doctors about the cases was leaked to the press, causing international attention. Within a month of the leaked memo, federal scientists assembled a working group. Canada’s federal health research agency granted $5 million for a study that would have included interviews, diagnostic tests, and samples from humans and the environment.

From this point on, the investigation of the potential cluster and its possible explanations was rapidly derailed by intergovernmental turf wars in which one combatant was determined to make the problem go away. Within 20 months of the federal investigative study startup, the project was shut down by provincial authorities. They manipulated certain guidelines of scientific inquiry to arrive at conclusions favorable to the parties that might be responsible for the disease cluster. The footprint of industry appears in silhouette: its influence is not acknowledged in the official discourse, but its outline is visible in the shape of the provincial government’s behavior.

According to Mr. Donahue’s article, in an email circulated to provincial participants on May 6, the New Brunswick health authority “paused” the federal study and its working group to have the provincial health department “delve more deeply into existing data.” Ten days later, Dr Marrero was instructed by the province to stop reporting cases to the province, on instructions from “higher up.” New Brunswick officials’ internal communications show they were trying to keep the investigation from involving the federal people. For example, to prevent the project from being “multijurisdictional,” they eliminated two victims from the cluster who had moved out of New Brunswick.

The province also told the federal health authorities to stop communicating with the public because people in New Brunswick were becoming oversensitive. It then appointed its own new committee to oversee a surveillance study without providing details to victims and their supporters.

There is an information gap here suggesting that the province wanted to retain control because it believed the federal agencies would not be sufficiently sensitive to the economic impacts of any admission that environmental exposures to chemicals used in forestry and agriculture could be causing the problems.

Along with the federal investigation “pause,” the pathologist who did the autopsies on the first eight fatal cases decided there was nothing to the purported cluster. He announced that the null hypothesis explained everything. The null hypothesis dictates that we must assume there is no effect of whatever variable we are testing—in this case that there might be a new disease and it might be caused by environmental exposure. One of the federal working group experts called the pathologist’s position a “loophole” allowing policymakers and politicians to pretend nothing was really going on.

At this point, Kat Lanteigne, and writer and advocate, received an anonymous text saying the province was not serious about its investigation. Ms. Lanteigne is a New Brunswick native and campaigner for a safe blood supply in Canada. She followed up on the cluster issue and found that the provincial study had gone back to the federal group’s original findings in order to decide that there could not be a new disease because the victims did not have a common condition and many of their symptoms overlapped with multiple diseases.

This kind of reasoning illustrates several of the most serious problems with modern medical science. First is the silo problem. The neurologists in the New Brunswick public health system were oblivious to the plethora of research in public health itself, and in environmental health, establishing the influence of environmental exposures on disease. This allowed them to excise the idea from consideration.

Second, the New Brunswick cases included numerous households with multiple victims who were not genetically related, suggesting that a common external exposure was likely, yet the provincial health authorities eliminated any search for a toxicant—this despite the widespread adoption among scientists of the term “exposome” to encompass the thousands of environmental substances that leave their marks on humans and the biosphere.

Further, it is now commonly recognized that genes, upbringing, and external exposures interact and that very few diseases are caused by one influence alone. As the reality that diseases result from many factors becomes more and more obvious, policymakers, regulators, and health officials alike must consider cross-disciplinary evidence. In a December 2022 article in The Walrus about the New Brunswick cluster, a senior Canadian federal scientist said, “We have an unbelievably capable set of tools to look at biological and epidemiological and environmental characteristics…It’s amazing, the potential that is not being tapped.”

Third, the provincial health authorities failed to consider that the causes of symptoms that occur in multiple diseases may originate farther back in the causal chain than they have looked. For example, see Beyond Pesticides’ post “Research Links Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Disease with Chemical Effects on Brain and Gut,” which details the efforts of University of Rochester neurologist E. Ray Dorsey, M.D. to follow up on evidence that Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia may be the same disease, both caused by environmental exposures—such as to paraquat—but in which the damage travels to the brain from the gut nervous system in one manifestation and via the nasal nerves in the other. Dr. Dorsey has since gone so far as to call Parkinson’s “man-made.”

On February 24, 2022, the province’s chief medical officer announced the provincial oversight committee had finished its work. It “could find no common exposure in the group.” In the final report, provincial health officials said the case definition was overly broad and overlapped other diseases. Therefore, they said, no human tissue testing was necessary.

The federal scientists appear to disagree with the province’s conclusions. Michael Coulthart, PhD, head of the federal surveillance system for CJD, said, “My scientific opinion is that there is something real going on in [New Brunswick] that absolutely cannot be explained by the bias or agenda of an individual neurologist.” He, too, thought there must be “an environmental trigger.”

Once the provincial inquiry concluded, patients were routed back to the doctors who had referred them to Dr. Marrero in the first place. They were told by provincial health officials what their doctors should consider as diagnoses, such as schizophrenia, progressive supranuclear palsy, cancer, alcoholism-induced brain damage, HIV, and various dementias. Depending on the individual patient, most of those conditions had been ruled out before they were referred to Dr. Marrero.

Dr. Marrero now has 430 patients with undiagnosable conditions, and 111 of them are under 45. Thirty-nine have died. New Brunswick, Dr. Marrero says, is the center of one of the largest dementia clusters in young people in the world.

The New Brunswick victims join a long line of populations whose sacrifice to industry has been abetted by captured experts and government officials who define their investigations in such a way as to eliminate consideration of vast amounts of relevant evidence. Victims usually have to endure years of suffering and effort, self-funding testing and further study, before accumulating the political influence to change the direction of a regulatory apparatus that grinds far too slowly toward justice.

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