I always find articles like this eerie, because it might be nothing...or the start of a major worldwide disease.

The earliest articles about HIV/AIDS[1] and COVID-19[2] both had similar tones to them ("unknown", "similar to", "possibly a new disease", etc.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/03/us/rare-cancer-seen-in-41...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/world/asia/china-SARS-pne...

>A first case was diagnosed in 2015, according to the memo. Three years later, in 2019, 11 additional cases were discovered, with 24 more cases discovered in 2020 and another six cases in 2021. Five people have died.

So not 40 cases all at once in case anyone was worried.

Should be interesting to see how long it takes to figure out how it's being transmitted. What all those 40 people had in common...some lake, or medical procedure, etc, that they all had. Assuming it is a prion disease...

Apparently prions are pretty hard to kill off, the sterilization procedures are pretty long. https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd/infection-control.html

Yikes, I grew up in that area (on the U.S. side) and my neighbor down the street passed away from a disease related to mad cow disease about 10 years ago. The article lists mad cow as a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease...I wonder if this is what he had?

The area is largely agricultural, and the cancer rate for that region is high compared to the rest of the state (Maine). Hmm.

I wonder if Chronic Wasting Disease has finally jumped to humans given that NB has a large number of Deer/Moose hunters.

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"the disease is not genetic and could be contracted from water, food or air."

New Brunswick is basically a lumber colony for the Irving companies (also, so is Northern Maine, see sprainedankels' comment elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26506784). On average 1% of the forest cover of New Brunswick (at least 85% of the province is forest cover) is clear-cut every year, and then the clear cut is drenched in herbicides from the air. The current herbicide is glyphosate, which has been linked to neurological disorders, but aerial spraying of herbicides in other forms dates back to the 1950s.

Here is a linkdump for more information:

http://www.stopsprayingnb.ca/

http://isourforestreallyours.com/Isourforestreallyours/Start...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160322213243/http://dearbriang...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/forests-and-flo...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/louis-lapierre-...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/forestry-deal-r...

This even comes up in the comments section on satire websites:

"Back around 1973 or 1974, I knew of a photographer who had a summer contract with Irving, documenting the effect of spraying. He photographed deformities, poisoned animals, etc. The company was very secretive and made sure that every single roll of film was handed back to them." https://themanatee.net/firing-of-dr-cleary-proves-once-for-a...

https://themanatee.net/new-brunswicks-10-most-beautiful-clea...

I was hoping not to see CJD or prions mentioned in this article.

I wonder if these tests for prion diseases included chronic wasting disease that occurs in deer populations. Is there a lot of deer hunting in New Brunswick? If this is a prion disease and it is caused by the same prion as chronic wasting disease, a lot of people are going to die in north america.

>Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and some of its variants, including mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE.

I thought CJD and BSE were the same thing.

Not entirely related, but how many new diseases are discovered every year ? For example we have new coronavirus every now and then, but what else ?

It's mad cow and I don't believe that the US has had only 6 cases of mad cow with the insane way cattle get treated.

They just call them "downers" and terminate them and some most likely end up in the food supply.