Hacker News Reader

Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I won’t presume to suggest a cause, but it’s worth acknowledging how terrifying it is that any of a number of compounds in a relatively small dose could cause wild effects on the human mind or body.

View on HN

ICYMI there has been a ongoing 20+ year epidemic of kidney disease in Central American manual laborers, no one has pinned down an exact cause yet but it definitely seems to be heat exposure related. Not quite as scary as something that resembles CJD but lots of researchers looking into for a long time without finding definitive cause.

https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2019/central-american-k...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/26/7538343...

There have been sufferers ranging from age 18-85, and it affects both men and women in approximately equal numbers. Both of those things are highly suggestive of some kind of environmental cause. If this were an episode of House, a lot of peoples' homes would be getting broken into right about now.

They break into people's houses in that show?

Yup; it isn’t a realistic show, but entertaining.

It's a medical take on Sherlock Holmes. Everything makes more sense when viewed through that lens.

House and Wilson Holmes and Watson

Which is a criminological take on a medical doctor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bell

House sends off one of his minions who find the brake cleaner in the sink cupboard, from which he immediately figures out that the patient's erratic behavior stems from a disease of the liver so the previous brain surgery was largely unneccesary.

It's never lupus.

Doctors in New Brunswick have generally been pointing to the use of certain pesticides/herbicides as likely culprit so far

Well, yes. This has always been the case, I'm not sure it's worth being especially terrified over it.

Botulinum toxin has an LD50 of a couple of nanograms per kg of body weight, which makes it especially mad that people use it in a fairly loose fashion for cosmetic skin tightening.

The opposite should be investigated as well. The deficiencies in nutrients like copper, selenium or molybdenum are generally only known in animals, and rarely investigated among people. Copper deficiency can cause various symptoms like weight loss, loss of pigment, indigestion, or neurological problems. It seems that molybdenum deficiency shifts the symptoms towards neurological, while the rest happens from copper deficiency alone.

I think some people have been talking about selenium deficiency since the 1970s. The trace metals are something of a problem since it's also possible to have harmful effects from too much.

Why would these deficiencies occur in one specific geographical area ?

All of the milk in Canada is fortified with vitamin D because the population is more at risk of vitamin D deficiency due to geography. (Less sunlight for more of the year.)

So it's not entirely _impossible_, but I agree it doesn't seem very likely.

Or it shows how fragile space and time really are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com