Disturbing Number of Cases of Neurodegenerative Disease in Canada

Troubling and inexplicable "progressive neurological illness" affecting young people in Canada. Known facts:

• Up to 150 people documented, although actual number of cases could be greater
• Impacts healthy young people with no previous relevant health history
• Mechanism of biological action seems to be protein misfolding
• Cases first announced Spring 2021
• Government less than eager to investigate
• Experts silenced

MEDIA COVERAGE (hat tip Naked Emperor for the Cecco & MacDiarmid cite)

Cecco, L. & MacDiarmid, C. (2024, June 21). Second Canadian scientist alleges brain illness investigation was shut down. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/21/second-canadian-scientist-alleges-brain-illness-investigation-was-shut-down?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

...This month, the Guardian reported that another leading federal scientist, Michael Coulthart, had alleged he had been barred from investigating the cluster of unexplained illnesses.

Coulthart, a microbiologist who heads Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance System, wrote in a leaked email that he believed 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 and Parkinson’s.

The revelations that top federal scientists believe the government has stonewalled an investigation has infuriated some of those affected and their families, who are demanding a response.

“I really feel alarmed but not surprised at how the information is being dismissed. And I feel that there is a moral and ethical responsibility for other officials to step in,” said Stacie Quigley Cormier, whose 23-year-old daughter Gabrielle is suffering from a neurological disorder that has left her with muscle loss and shaking. “I don’t feel like they’ve forgotten about us. I feel like they’ve intentionally pretended to forget about us and that there’s nothing to see here,” she said in a phone interview...

 

Cecco, L. (2022, January 2). Whistleblower warns baffling illness affects growing number of young adults in Canadian province. Yahoo. https://www.yahoo.com/news/whistleblower-warns-baffling-neurological-illness-110015762.html

A whistleblower in the Canadian province of New Brunswick has warned that a progressive neurological illness that has baffled experts for more than two years appears to be affecting a growing number of young people and causing swift cognitive decline among some of the afflicted.

Speaking to the Guardian, an employee with Vitalité Health Network, one of the province’s two health authorities, said that suspected cases are growing in number and that young adults with no prior health triggers are developing a catalog of troubling symptoms, including rapid weight loss, insomnia, hallucinations, difficulty thinking and limited mobility.

The official number of cases under investigation, 48, remains unchanged since it was first announced in early spring 2021. But multiple sources say the cluster could now be as many as 150 people, with a backlog of cases involving young people still requiring further assessment.

WHAT IS CAUSING THIS CRISIS

What could be causing the protein misfolding? It will be impossible to identify the causal agents without substantial investigation but I do have to wonder about the frameshifting effects of mRNA vaccines that do produce misfolded proteins, as reported here in the Guardian:

Pinkstone, J. (2023, December 6). Science Correspondent 6 December 2023 One in four who had Pfizer Covid jabs experienced unintended immune response https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/06/mrna-jabs-modena-pfizer-quarter-unintended-response/
mRNA vaccines were affected by the glitch but no adverse effects were created, Cambridge researchers say. More than a quarter of people injected with mRNA Covid jabs suffered an unintended immune response created by a glitch in the way the vaccine was read by the body, a study has found.

No adverse effects were created by the error, data show, but Cambridge scientists found such vaccines were not perfect and sometimes led to nonsense proteins being made instead of the desired Covid “spike”, which mimics infection and leads to antibody production.

mRNA jabs, such as the ones created by Moderna and Pfizer, use a string of genetic material to tell the body to create a specific protein that safely imitates an infection.

Research in the field, spanning decades, had been slow work. It often stalled because RNA itself is often attacked by the body as a foreign invader.

 

RELEVANT RESEARCH

The reason the mRNAs produce frameshifting has been pinpointed as resulting from the substitution of a naturally occurring ribonucleotide with a synthetic one in order to reduce immunogenicity. This substitution affects "the fidelity of mRNA translation" thereby causing these frameshifting errors:

Mulroney, T.E., Pöyry, T., Yam-Puc, J.C. et al. N1-methylpseudouridylation of mRNA causes +1 ribosomal frameshifting. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06800-

in vitro-transcribed (IVT) mRNAs are modalities that can combat human disease, exemplified by their use as vaccines for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). IVT mRNAs are transfected into target cells, where they are translated into recombinant protein, and the biological activity or immunogenicity of the encoded protein exerts an intended therapeutic effect1,2.

Modified ribonucleotides are commonly incorporated into therapeutic IVT mRNAs to decrease their innate immunogenicity3,4,5, but their effects on mRNA translation fidelity have not been fully explored. Here we demonstrate that incorporation of N1-methylpseudouridine into mRNA results in +1 ribosomal frameshifting in vitro and that cellular immunity in mice and humans to +1 frameshifted products from BNT162b2 vaccine mRNA translation occurs after vaccination.

The +1 ribosome frameshifting observed is probably a consequence of N1-methylpseudouridine-induced ribosome stalling during IVT mRNA translation, with frameshifting occurring at ribosome slippery sequences. However, we demonstrate that synonymous targeting of such slippery sequences provides an effective strategy to reduce the production of frameshifted products. Overall, these data increase our understanding of how modified ribonucleotides affect the fidelity of mRNA translation, and although there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans, these data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.

See also

Tursi, N.J. & Weinder, D.B. (2023, December). Modified messenger-RNA components alter the encoded protein. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03787-9

Of course, we don't KNOW that the frameshifting effect of the mRNAs is causing these problems in Canada. 

Why would New Brunswick have such a clustering effect? If the mRNA vaccines were the cause wouldn't we see the effect more widely distributed? Of course, it is feasible that a bad batch led to concentrated effects but without investigation there is no way of testing this hypothesis.

Other neurodegenerative impacts of the mRNA vaccines have been identified beyond the frameshifting hazard:

• Idrees D, Kumar V. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein interactions with amyloidogenic proteins: Potential clues to neurodegeneration. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 2021 May 21;554:94-98. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2021.03.100. Epub 2021 Mar 24. PMID: 33789211; PMCID: PMC7988450.

• Tetyana P. Buzhdygan, Brandon J. DeOre, Abigail Baldwin-Leclair, Trent A. Bullock, Hannah M. McGary, Jana A. Khan, Roshanak Razmpour, Jonathan F. Hale, Peter A. Galie, Raghava Potula, Allison M. Andrews, Servio H. Ramirez, The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alters barrier function in 2D static and 3D microfluidic in-vitro models of the human blood–brain barrier, Neurobiology of Disease, 146, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbd.2020.105131. "Blood-brain barrier function is negatively affected by SARS-CoV-2 spike protein subunits. Brain endothelial cells show a distinct pro-inflammatory response when exposed to various SARS-CoV-2 spike protein subunits." 

As I've already pointed out, we simply don't know but the Canadian government's efforts to shut down investigation, as criticized by their own scientists, raises red flags.

 

READ MORE

Berenson, A. (2023, December 11). More bad news for the mRNAs. https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1734192432361677291/photo/1

Jessica Rose Dec 12, 2023. That Substack about N1-methylpseudouridines and frameshifting. https://jessicar.substack.com/p/that-substack-about-n1-methylpseudouridines?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Spartacus Jan 17, 2024 Spartacast 16 https://open.substack.com/pub/iceni/p/spartacast-16?r=q89bo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Toward the emergence of a new form of neurodegenerative Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.https://www.researchgate.net publication/363484655_Towards_the_emergence_of_a_new_form_of_the_neurodegenerative_Creutzfeldt-Jakob_disease_Twenty_six_cases_of_CJD_declared_a_few_days_after_a_COVID-19_vaccine_Jab