Alier Marrero is stumped.
For years, the neurologist in Moncton, New Brunswick, has seen patients with symptoms common to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal brain disorder that affects 1 in 1 million people each year.
But diagnostic testing for the rare neurodegenerative syndrome keeps coming back negative, more patients with similar symptoms have turned up each year, and Marrero hasn’t found another cause. Federal public health officials last year identified the cases as a cluster meriting further investigation.
