A funeral took place on Monday for New Brunswick’s former chief medical officer of health.
Dr. Eilish Cleary died of ovarian cancer on Friday at the age of 60, according to her obituary.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Cleary become the youngest doctor in the country at the time at age 22.
She and her family moved to Canada in 1998, first to Norway House Cree Nation in northern Manitoba.
Cleary found another job in Manitoba, which became the family’s home for several years.
She later moved to New Brunswick and was hired as the province’s top doctor in 2007.
Cleary was later dismissed by the Liberals in 2015 in a controversial move the government called a personnel matter.
At the time, the top doctor was working on a study of the controversial herbicide glyphosate and its health effects.
The report, which was eventually released several months later in 2016, found “no increased risk” for New Brunswickers exposed to the herbicide.
Glyphosate was classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015.
