This is The Guardian.

I cover Canada for The Guardian and occasionally kind of stories pop up on our radar that seem like they're local stories.

And then you give them a bit of a pause and you look and you realize there might be something a bit more to it.

When Layland Checo came across a memo sent to health officials in the Canadian province

of New Brunswick, warning them to be on the lookout for an unknown brain illness, he was

intrigued. So I flagged that to my editor, and what we thought was maybe going to be a one-off story or one in which there was an answer, turned into what's been a multi-year, baffling, mysterious, and ultimately quite confusing investigation.

This was in 2021, but the story had actually begun a few years earlier.

A cluster of more than 40 patients had emerged, presenting with odd neurological symptoms.

They were suffering from hallucinations, they had the feeling of insects crawling on their skin,

they had trouble balancing, trouble with their speech, with their memory. It was a pretty

wide range of neurological challenges they were facing. For the neurologists seeing them,

there was no kind of neat basket you could put them in.

The doctors couldn't figure out what was going on.

It's actually like really hard to figure out what someone has if they have a neurological illness.

In the intervening years, the number of people that appear to fit the case description has continued to

stack up. And what's particularly strange and concerning is that several of the patients are

relatively young. Some are even in their 20s and 30s. This one woman needs to use Alexa to remind

her to shower and to eat because she said her

kind of a neurological decline is something that the doctor told her is closer to someone in their 80s.

There have been investigations, concerns about environmental contaminants, claims of cover-ups,

and many surprising twists and turns in the story.

It's left those affected and their families with more questions than answers.

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