A piercing investigative article on Aug. 14 in The New York Times by journalist Greg Donahue reveals the abandonment of a group of brain disease patients in an area of Canada with forestry management for paper products, agriculture and large amounts of pesticide use, including glyphosate.
It illustrates the tension in the relationship between government authorities, regulated industries and neurologists (physicians) on the front lines.
The article details the manner in which health officials appeared to manipulate their own investigation of a disease cluster to make it less disruptive to the economy of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. (This Beyond Pesticides analysis, where not otherwise indicated, draws on Donahue’s article.)
New Brunswick has one major town, Moncton, and a large rural area characterized by agriculture and forestry. The province’s agriculture industry is dominated by blueberry production, which occupies the fourth-largest amount of agricultural land in New Brunswick.
About half the province is forested, with increasing amounts of land devoted to tree plantations intended for paper production.
Glyphosate is hands-down the most heavily used pesticide in New Brunswick forestry, and New Brunswick is second only to Ontario in Canada’s total area of glyphosate-treated forest. The herbicide is especially heavily used in clearcuts and tree plantations.
Glyphosate’s innocence, assumed for decades since it entered the market in 1974, has been thoroughly disproved.
According to a comprehensive 2020 review, it is toxic to cells; disrupts hormones and gut microbe balance; contributes to non-alcoholic liver disease; may trigger heart arrhythmias; has been strongly correlated with multiple myeloma and large B-cell lymphoma; and less strongly correlated with melanoma, leukemia and colon, rectal, bladder and kidney cancers.
Hellbound and Down 