I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this:

New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded company), in charge of the main industries of the province. They owned every newspaper in the province, and are known to be adversarial to any community paper, starting new papers just to drive out of business the small upstarts they don't own -- I've seen it play out in my community. People are literally afraid to criticize this family publicly, because they fund SO MUCH of the nonprofit sector. If you are trying to get a project off the ground, you can't look sideways at them or your project will be buried. And their papers certainly won't speak kindly of your criticism.

And most glaringly, one of their ex-Vice Presidents was premier of the province during this time.

So there is an extra level of concern that some locals have about the optics of the province shutting down the research.

The Irving family is highly manipulative of political affairs, and imho have held the province back for decades (e.g. influencing what schools get funded/built, to create the working stock that support their businesses, etc)

The only common factor between these patients is Dr. Marrero. It is notable that he is not the only physician who works in that clinic, but is the only one diagnosing this condition. The most likely cause is weak diagnostic skills for challenging patients.

Unfortunately, a majority of these patients likely have Functional Neurologic Disorder https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conversion-di... , which is a horrible condition that accounts for a plurality of cases seen by most neurologists. This phantom diagnosis will probably make recovery almost impossible for those people. Acceptance of that diagnosis is the number 1 positive indicator for recovery.

Source: I live in the canadian maritimes, and know many neurologists.

It's entirely possible as for cancer clusters there is no single causative agent. That stuff demands really careful thoughtful handling, not just brush-offs. Getting the public past personal experiences to epidemiology and subsequently things like mental health, is very hard.

Look at ME and what post covid syndrome showed.

Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope.

Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a similar mis-folded shape when they come into contact with them. The mis-folded shape of the prion itself is what causes the mis-folding in adjacent proteins. It’s a chemical-bonding thing at the molecular level. It’s the shape of the prion that causes other proteins to take on a similar shape and become prions, etc.

Some prion diseases occur spontaneously (when a protein takes on a mis-folded configuration due to mis-transcription or random energetic impulses) and some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations.

Prion diseases are the only known transmissible diseases that do not involve the replication of a pathogen’s genetic material in a host cell. The only known prion diseases affect nervous tissues, and in humans the only known prion diseases affect brain tissues.

I’m not an expert on prion diseases, but I’ve had a bit of a fascination with them since having to report on a bunch of USDA surveillance lectures on mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE) and to summarize a bunch of symposia on prion diseases in a previous life. The symptoms reported in the article sound very much like a prion disease, and the tests for CJD indicate that the doctors in the region suspect as much.

But we simply don’t have good tests for prion diseases in vivo. And prion diseases are not well understood in general, so it wouldn’t be surprising that a new one would present as something of a mystery.

It is also the case that I know very little about New Brunswick, but I will mention that prion diseases in humans are thought to be far more commonly acquired than spontaneous. The most common cause of acquisition is eating animals with endemic prion diseases; this is most often nervous tissue of venison, but rarely nervous tissue of cattle infected with BSE, which is present in Canada more than anywhere else (by a small margin).

It is also possible (but not likely) that a prion disease can arise de novo.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion_disease

At one point I checked into the ER with a resting heart rate around 200 BPM, and on some days my smartwatch couldn’t even detect a pulse because it was racing so fast.

I eventually recovered-though I still avoid wearing smart devices because seeing my heart rate triggers anxiety-but the whole period ended without a root cause and with me just being put on heartrate reducers for a while.

I really feel for anyone dealing with "mystery" medical conditions. It’s a tough place to be.

They are split on whether his thoroughness is just fueling false hopes and sending patients down unnecessary rabbit holes or if he could have potentially identified a real issue.

The fact that the investigation was disbanded simply because the patients had symptoms that can be tied to existing diseases is utterly asinine. As if there’s no reason to investigate why so many people in such a small area have similar conditions, or even to investigate whether or not the demographics of the supposed cluster are out of the ordinary in the first place. Even if there was no related cause at all, such an investigation could be used to determine that Dr. Marrero was the cause of a problem and stop him from doing harm. But instead the result was that no satisfactory conclusion was reached for the majority of people, and the patients continue to suffer.

These people need help and they are being failed by their doctors, their administrative officials and their representatives all at the same time.

One patient, whose brother, ironically, was a physician (and one skeptical of Morgellons as anything other than delusional parasitosis), seemed earnest, if intense, in describing how Morgellons had destroyed his quality of life... but then he started describing how he felt like he was able to inadvertently affect electronic devices, especially RF-based ones, because the Morgellons "fibers" in his extremities caused some kind of interference. At this point, he sounded squarely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

However, one could very well imagine an infectious disease, with or without a dermatological component, causing delusional parasitosis. Maybe they have some virus or something that makes them think they have these "fibers?" Or a parasite? Toxoplasma gondii is known to affect inhibition. UTIs in the elderly are notorious for making them crazy.

My theory is that this hypothesis is shut down by the fishing industry.

Sadly, the Irvings have extremely close ties with both the Liberals [1] and Conservatives [2][3] and are essentially untouchable due to Canada's parliamentary nature.

The NYT has been doing an on-the-ground report on this issue for a couple years now [4][5]

It reminds me of similar stories I heard while growing up from family friends of mine who ran a construction business on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland about how cheap it was to "lobby" and get a personal meeting and photograph with Martin and Harper, and this was after Railgate.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...

[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-minister-le...

[2] - https://nsadvocate.org/2020/09/15/big-win-for-the-irvings-in...

[3] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/pcs-criticized-...

[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...

[5] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/world/canada/irving-famil...

Wait… what?

> But the government had decided against examining any of the patients in person

Wait… what?

* are all the patients really sick or as sick as the symptoms he documents, or is it some kind of Munchausen induced or lied about by the doctor?

* Or are they all sick, they're just not getting the help they need because he wants to have a mystery disease?

* If they're all sick, is it then a higher prevalence than expected, so even if there is no mystery disease there is still something environmental or similar that should've been explored? Aka, is there a cluster, it's just a known disease?

The article ends in a heart breaking way. The one woman is applying for MAID. I wonder if she had better care if she could have been properly diagnosed and treated. Instead, she is going to try to end her life.

I think there's a real indictment here about how liberal Canada's MAID program is which the article glosses over.

> The couple waited eight months to get important test results from Marrero, Strickland said, as April's condition worsened. Soon Strickland could no longer manage her care. But to get her a place in assisted living he needed a letter of support from Marrero. "I think I waited four months for that letter," Strickland recalled. "I kept phoning and asking."

just sounds like medical malpractice. You shouldn't keep five hundred patients hanging if you can't handle five hundred. Makes all the talk about being empathetic and caring sound like bullshit. I feel bad for those who are probably misdiagnosed but refuse to get a second opinion thanks to the successful mental subjugation.