Canadaland

For the past four years Canadaland has been investigating a cluster of terrible illnesses in New Brunswick. A group of people were suffering from debilitating symptoms that nobody could explain. Those people lost neurological function. Some lost their lives. What was afflicting them? Was it a prion illness like mad cow disease? Was it somehow linked to shellfish? Might it have to do with blue-green algae blooms or environmental contamination from heavy metals or contamination from the herbicide glyphosate? Was it contagious? Today we speak with a man who was at the centre of the investigation into this cluster of illnesses. Dr. Michael Coulthart was a microbiologist working with the Public Health Agency of Canada. He was the head of Canada’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) surveillance system, which surveys all of Canada for prion diseases like mad cow. And he was one of the lead investigators on a short-lived federal/provincial team of scientists investigating what was going on in New Brunswick bef