When people started presenting with symptoms, local doctors and scientists wondered if the mysterious neurological disorder might be Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t anything else that we recognize, either.

And the symptoms are a long list that run from inconvenient to painful to life-altering and deadly. We don’t know what’s causing it, haven’t been able to treat it and—because of the pandemic—haven’t been able to fully research the places where it may have come from. What we do know is that it’s awful. And in New Brunswick it’s becoming more common.

GUEST: Amanda Coletta, The Washington Post

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