Posts tagged mystery

Famed environmental activist Erin Brockovich met resistance as her team tried to test the area around an upstate New York school for clues to a case involving more than a dozen teens plagued by mysterious Tourette’s-like symptoms and seizures.

At the request of local parents, Brokovich sent a team to LeRoy High School Saturday to investigate possible environmental causes for the  illness that has caused a group of girls to develop tics and involuntary verbal outbursts. One neurologist who has seen most of the affected girls has diagnosed their illness as psychological in origin, but some parents and members of the community have disputed that diagnosis.

The State Health Department has tested the school and ruled out environmental factors. But Brockovich plans to do more testing near the school in LeRoy, N.Y.

Brockovich told USA TODAY Friday that she is looking into a 1970 train accident that spilled cyanide and an industrial solvent called trichloroethene close to the site of the school.

Bob Bowcock, a member of Brokovich’s team, came to LeRoy from California, NBC News reported. 

Bowcock looked at ground water and soil at a nearby park for anything out of the ordinary. “I’m just looking at the environment. I’m trying to see where things drain to. What types of soils they are,” Bowcock told NBC News.

However, the school placed locks on all the entrances to the sports field, NBC’s Rochester, NY, station reported Saturday. Local police and a school security guard initially refused to allow the Brokovich crew on school grounds until the school superintendent and a district spokesman arrived. Officials agreed to let parents, Bowcock and his team walk the grounds, without media, as long as they didn’t take any samples.

he mystery surrounding the strange illness that has struck a group of teenage girls in upstate New York deepened this week as more teens developed the same Tourette’s-like symptoms.

Dr. Laszlo Mechtler, the neurologist who has seen and is treating 10 of the 12 girls originally struck by the puzzling illness, told NBC’s Amy Robach that more girls had recently reached out to him.

One of those girls, Chelsey Dummars, told Robach how those symptoms have changed her life.

“I was doing things,” Dummars said, her words punctuated by tics and grunts. “I was going places a lot before this happened. Now I don’t feel like even going to stores because I feel like people look at me and judge me.”

(Source: MSN)

Environmental activist Erin Brockovich.

A mystery illness which left a dozen high school students with Tourette’s-like symptoms has now been reported in another town 400km away.

Last Spring 12 female students from Le Roy High School in New York were struck down by the baffling condition which left them suffering from facial tics, convulsions and paralysis.

Now the number has risen to 15 and includes two girls from Saratoga County and a boy who also attends Le Roy High School.

The 12 girls from Le Roy were diagnosed with conversion disorder, or mass hysteria, which is a physiological condition often caused by a traumatic event.

Now environmental crusader Erin Brockovich has been called in to help investigate how the teenagers developed the mystery illness.

Brockovich, a lawyer and activist who gained fame when Julia Roberts played her in a biographical film, is not convinced of the diagnosis and believes groundwater contamination from a chemical spill more than 40 years ago may be causing the symptoms.

“They have not ruled everything out yet,” Brockovich told USA Today.

“The community asked us to help and this is what we do.”

The aunt of sick student Katie Miller contacted Brockovich for help because her family was not convinced of the mass hysteria diagnosis.

“We’re just trying to eliminate everything, and she wants to eliminate that it’s the environment,” said Katie’s father, Don Miller.

“It’s a possibility and she wants to prove it is or it isn’t something in the environment.”

Lori Brownell, one of the teenagers affected by the bizarre symptoms, posted a video on YouTube last December hoping someone may see it and be able to help diagnose her condition.

“We’re still trying to find answers for all of this… So far, we got nothing,” she tells the camera.

The New York Department of Health found “no evidence of environmental or infection as the cause of the girls’ illness” but said others were free to test the water themselves.

Many of the students are unable to return to school.

Another of the teenage girls affected by the symptoms, 17-year-old Thera Sanchez, told the

Today Show she had started the school year off like any other, but things took a dramatic turn after October 7.

“When these started, I was fine. I was perfectly fine. I felt good about everything, I was on honour roll. There was nothing going wrong. And then I just woke up and that’s when the stuttering started,” Thera said.

“I used to cheer every day. I used to go to two art classes every day. Now I’m not in school.”

(Source: news.ninemsn.com.au)