Dateline Canada: 
Mysterious Brain Syndrome Grips Canada
This is reporting from the New York Times
As the coronavirus raged across the country the past 15 months, the medical enigma was initially slow to gain national attention. Canadian health authorities, distracted by the need to respond to the pandemic, scrambled to determine the seriousness of the outbreak, which was only publicly exposed after a memo about it by New Brunswick’s chief medical officer was leaked to the press in March.
Doctors investigating the disease say the sluggish response underlines the challenge for other medical conditions to compete for the spotlight during a global pandemic.
Medical experts said the murkiness surrounding the illness also reflected how, despite extraordinary advances in medical science, some conditions, in particular neurological diseases involving dementia, can puzzle even the world’s best scientific brains.
Dr. Neil Cashman, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who is investigating the illness, said it was a medical whodunit of the type seen only a couple of times a century.
“From the standpoint of a mystery, there is usually something horrible, like a murder. In this case, it is rapidly progressive dementia and psychiatric manifestations, losing everything at once that is controlled by the brain and the spinal cord,” he said. “It is terrifying.”
Mysterious Brain Syndrome Grips Canada
This is reporting from the New York Times
As the coronavirus raged across the country the past 15 months, the medical enigma was initially slow to gain national attention. Canadian health authorities, distracted by the need to respond to the pandemic, scrambled to determine the seriousness of the outbreak, which was only publicly exposed after a memo about it by New Brunswick’s chief medical officer was leaked to the press in March.
Doctors investigating the disease say the sluggish response underlines the challenge for other medical conditions to compete for the spotlight during a global pandemic.
Medical experts said the murkiness surrounding the illness also reflected how, despite extraordinary advances in medical science, some conditions, in particular neurological diseases involving dementia, can puzzle even the world’s best scientific brains.
Dr. Neil Cashman, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who is investigating the illness, said it was a medical whodunit of the type seen only a couple of times a century.
“From the standpoint of a mystery, there is usually something horrible, like a murder. In this case, it is rapidly progressive dementia and psychiatric manifestations, losing everything at once that is controlled by the brain and the spinal cord,” he said. “It is terrifying.”
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