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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Been following this on and off and it's pretty strange generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_neurological_syn... && https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/magazine/canada-brain-dis...

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From your first link:

symptoms such as "rapidly progressing dementia", unusual weight loss, "tightening of the muscles", uncoordinated gait, and muscle atrophy

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organophosphate-induced_delaye...

Given other comments on this thread regarding large densities of mosquitoes, this might actually make sense if large amounts of insecticides are used in the region.

> The CJDSS ruled out any prion disorder, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)

Thank god.

That was my knee-jerk scenario to think of too - especially given the rising prevalence of Chronic Wasting Disease in the US states near that part of Canada.

It's notable that the CJDSS director said they ruled out "known forms of prion disease" specifically, and the neuropathologist Jansen stated "no evidence for a prion disease was found" - I think the sentence you're quoting is actually misleading because it seems to suggest that there is negative evidence for a prion disorder, which there is not.

Seems like it would be exceedingly difficult, bordering on impossible, to make a categorical negative finding that there's no possibility of prions because you'd have to have a test to detect any misfolded protein at all.

I am not a medical professional, so take this opinion with a grain of salt, but it seems like it should theoretically be possible to test for a concentration of misfolded proteins that propagate themselves.

How complex or expensive this could be is not something I have any insight into at all, it could be something that takes millions of dollars and 20 years per test.

Only for ones that bind to the proteins in your testing apparatus though. If this hypothetical new prion doesn't bind to the slate of proteins in the test it wouldn't show anything. Unless there's an easy way to detect the fibrils they form more easily and generally.

> Jansen presented his findings to 20 to 30 colleagues in which he suggested that the eight patients previously diagnosed with the novel neurological syndrome, "represent a group of misclassified clinical diagnoses", and that they "died from a variety of causes, including cancer, Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer's disease"

It seems this isn’t that complex of a case really though? Upon autopsy they just had normal issues.

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