It was a number of doctors that were baffled by their patients that referred them to Marrero. Besdies, he's not the only one convinced there's an environmental factor at play:
> In an October 2023 email exchange with another PHAC member, Coulthart, who served as the federal lead in the 2021 investigation into the New Brunswick illness, said he had been “essentially cut off” from any involvement in the issue, adding he believed the reason was political.
> Coulthart, a veteran scientist who currently heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment by the Guardian. But in the leaked email, he wrote that he believes an “environmental exposure – or a combination of exposures – is triggering and/or accelerating a variety of neurodegenerative syndromes” with people seemingly susceptible to different protein-misfolding ailments, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
> Coulthart argues this phenomenon does not easily fit within “shallow paradigms” of diagnostic pathology and the complexity of the issue has given politicians a “loophole” to conclude “nothing coherent” is going on.
Well it depends if you believe the report or the doctor:
> In an October 2023 email exchange with another PHAC member, Coulthart, who served as the federal lead in the 2021 investigation into the New Brunswick illness, said he had been “essentially cut off” from any involvement in the issue, adding he believed the reason was political.
> Coulthart, a veteran scientist who currently heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment by the Guardian. But in the leaked email, he wrote that he believes an “environmental exposure – or a combination of exposures – is triggering and/or accelerating a variety of neurodegenerative syndromes” with people seemingly susceptible to different protein-misfolding ailments, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
> Coulthart argues this phenomenon does not easily fit within “shallow paradigms” of diagnostic pathology and the complexity of the issue has given politicians a “loophole” to conclude “nothing coherent” is going on.
> Coulthart’s email emerged more than a year after Marrero pleaded with the Canadian government to carry out environmental testing he believed would show the involvement of glyphosate.
> The committee and the New Brunswick government also cast doubt on the work of neurologist Alier Marrero, who was initially referred dozens of cases by baffled doctors in the region, and subsequently identified more cases. The doctor has since become a fierce advocate for patients he feels have been neglected by the province.
It seems to me that it's doctors reaching out to Marrero. It also seems odd that [these|this] illness(es) disproportionately affected young people.
Another article I just read stated Marrero reached out to get second opinions but was blocked.
> He claims he made arrangements in 2020-21 for "subject-matter experts" to travel to New Brunswick to evaluate patients, but the province "chose not to avail itself of this invaluable expertise."
> It seems to me that it's doctors reaching out to Marrero.
This happens a lot in medicine: One doctor becomes locally renowned for taking in patients with hard-to-diagnose issues and giving them answers, right or wrong. Other doctors take note and then start offloading their difficult patients to other doctors happy to take them in.
It happens all the time with different doctors. Once they find a niche, they start diagnosing everyone with the same thing. A common theme is that their patients don't get better, but are happy to have someone give them a diagnosis.
In the scarier cases, it's surgeons doing this. There have been some sad periods in medicine where certain doctors starting performing unnecessary surgeries on everyone who visited them with vague symptoms. These doctors are scarily popular in a certain type of Facebook health group where patients congregate looking for answers and, lo and behold, some doctor or surgeon becomes their hero with a supposed answer to all of their questions. It usually goes on for several years before everyone realizes that nobody is getting better from these doctors and nobody ever gets rejected for a diagnosis when they visit that doctor.
The doctor in question here explicitly pointed out increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:
> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
They're probably referring to the different salts (isopropylamine (IPA), potassium, or diammonium) which can greatly affect absorption and effectiveness
But the doctor in the OP explicitly pointed out that they had increased levels of glyphosate in their blood:
> He also warned that some patients' blood work showed elevated levels for compounds found in herbicides such as glyphosate, and said more testing should be done to rule out environmental toxins, including the neurotoxin BMAA, which is produced by blue-green algae.
Just because glyphosate is everywhere doesn't mean it can't be concentrated in a particular place.
To be clear I'm not taking a stand for the glyphosate argument at all. I just don't think your line of reasoning is a fair counterargument in this case
They would need to have been ingesting or breathing the glyphosate pretty recent to their blood draw. It doesn't absorb easily into skin, and it passes through you quickly. And if you do get a concentrated dose, you get nausea, vomiting, respiratory issues (if inhaled). It's a weird thing to be the culprit, since it's hard to get, and doesn't cause many issues. And it's weird to mention at all, since he says only "a few people" had elevated levels of it.
"Melissa Nicholson said her 59-year-old mother, who has suffered for four years with a neurological disorder, received test results indicating she had levels of glyphosate in her body that were 47 times higher than the acceptable level."
This is bizarre. Either she lives right next to a farm that's spraying it, and she's getting it blown into an open window in her house where she's breathing it, and then immediately went for a blood test... or she's somehow ingesting it in/around her house (like from a bottle of Roundup that keeps getting splashed on something she's ingesting).
Yeah if you see something labelling itself "MIL-SPEC", that's grade A snake oil bullshit.
That said military spec stuff is actually generally a good sign that something is of higher quality than random off the shelf garbage but only if you know there's a specific spec you want it to work with. And most of the time you aren't even necessarily looking for a MIL-STD (standard) but rather a MIL-PRF (performance rating/spec).
So like if something is "MIL-SPEC" run. But if you see say a spool of fiber that is "MIL-STD-1678 compliant" and more importantly "MIL-PRF-49291 compliant" and "MIL-PRF-85054 compliant", that's probably a really good sign that it'll do its job. The former PRF documenting perf requirements for the fiber itself and the latter PRF the cabling/sheath's corrosion and deterioration resistance.
It's the military so odds are it'll probably cost extra for that and it'll still kinda suck but it'll suck in exactly the way they promised.
Hell, anything even close to salt water is apt to get ate. What's funny is you'll see people say they want to retire and get a beach house. No. You. Don't. Blowing sand is hard on stuff, getting in gears and moving parts. But the salt, the salt is like some alien monster that just dissolves things that flat landers would never expect. Get the smallest amount of saltwater flooding in a closet with equipment and things start to corrode away like it's an alien acid world.
Military grade afaict just implies the military ‘could’ use it, by that definition almost any company sells military grade products or services, except companies who explicitly would not sell to the military.
In the US, "military grade" is like "natural". There is no legally enforced meaning, so it means whatever the manufacturer says it means. Sometimes that's something real and of some value, but the majority of the time it's just a meaningless marketing buzzword.
the military often writes a spec and then refuses to buy anything that doesn't meet it. Most soldiers are not going to walmart to get supplies - even f walmart sells that type of thing.
"military grade" isn't a protected phrase. As a consumer you might be able to sue them if the thing breaks and they can't prove that phrase meant anything? But doubtful.
Claiming to conform to a more specific product or process standard would be more specific fraud.
But in general though "military grade" is a red flag for shitty marketing.
If you had one, you could also buy games in the form of “cartridges”. Putting one of those cartridges into the gameboy would let you play the game for as long as the batteries held out.
You should also consider OpenLibrary and LibraryThing. Both of which have good coverage on WikiData which also aggregates identifiers.
In fact, now that I think about it, you could also contribute your work to WikiData. I don't see ISBNdb ids on WikiData so you could write a script to make those contributions. Then anyone else using WikiData for this sort of thing can benefit from your work
I haven’t created a ticket for OpenLibrary yet, but it’s on my mental todo list. I’ll create the ticket for multiple new extractors today.
I’d love to help improve other services. I plan on charging for Librario at some point, but I’ll offer a free version and offer free API keys for projects like Calibre and others.
A couple years I looked for a similar service and failed to find it. I did however find this incredible podcast network called New Books In where they interview authors about their new books. It's a massive network that's broken down by categories that can get pretty niche. Everything from "Digital Humanities" to "Diplomatic History" to "Critical Theory". Episodes appear in multiple categories so broad categories like "Science" also exist
I find WikiData to be perfect for aggregating identifiers. I mostly work with species names and it's perfect for getting the iNaturalist, GBIF, Open Tree of Life, Catalogue of Life, etc identities all in one query
I haven't tried it for books. I imagine it's not sufficiently complete to serve as a backbone but a quick look at an example book gives me the ids for OpenLibrary, Librarything, Goodreads, Bing, and even niche stuff like the National Library of Poland MMS ID.
Cracks me up that OP is trying Anna's Archive before Wikidata, NGL! Both great sources, though.
I recently (a year ago... wow) dipped my toe into the world of library science through Wikidata, and was shocked at just how complex it is. OP's work looks really solid, but I hope they're aware of how mature the field is!
For illustration, here are just the book-relevant ID sources I focused on from Wikidata:
ARCHIVERS:
Library of Congress Control Number `P1144` (173M)
Open Library `P648` (39M)
Online Computer Library Center `P10832` (10M)
German National Library `P227` (44M)
Smithsonian Institute `P7851` (155M)
Smitsonian Digital Ark `P9473` (3M)
U.S. Office of Sci. & Tech. Info. `P3894`
PUBLISHERS:
Google Books `P675` (1M)
Project Gutenberg `P2034` (70K)
Amazon `P5749`
CATALOGUERS:
International Standard Book Number `P212`
Wikidata `P8379` (115B)
EU Knowledge Graph `P11012`
Factgrid Database `P10787` (0.4M)
Google Knowledge Graph `P2671` (500B)
> In an October 2023 email exchange with another PHAC member, Coulthart, who served as the federal lead in the 2021 investigation into the New Brunswick illness, said he had been “essentially cut off” from any involvement in the issue, adding he believed the reason was political.
> Coulthart, a veteran scientist who currently heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, did not respond to a request for comment by the Guardian. But in the leaked email, he wrote that he believes an “environmental exposure – or a combination of exposures – is triggering and/or accelerating a variety of neurodegenerative syndromes” with people seemingly susceptible to different protein-misfolding ailments, including Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
> Coulthart argues this phenomenon does not easily fit within “shallow paradigms” of diagnostic pathology and the complexity of the issue has given politicians a “loophole” to conclude “nothing coherent” is going on.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/03/canada...
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