I came across an article about ticks and conspiracy theories this morning and thought I would share part of it. The author of the article was Sam Telford from Tufts University.
Could Lyme disease in the U.S. be the result of an accidental release from a secret bioweapons experiment? Could the military have specifically engineered the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive – and then let it somehow escape the lab and spread in nature?
Is this why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with this potentially debilitating disease?
It’s an old conspiracy theory currently enjoying a resurgence with lots of sensational headlines and tweets. Even Congress has ordered that the Pentagon must reveal whether it weaponized ticks.
And it’s not true.
Ticks can indeed carry infectious agents that could be used as biological weapons. Military research has long focused on ticks. Sites around Long Island Sound, near the military’s Plum Island research lab, were some of the first places where the American Lyme disease epidemic was identified.
But there was no release of the Lyme disease agent or any other onto American soil, accidental or otherwise, by the military.
I started working on Lyme disease in 1985. As part of my doctoral thesis, I investigated whether museum specimens of ticks and mice contained evidence of infection with the bacterial agent of Lyme disease prior to the first known American human cases in the mid 1970s.
Working with microbiologist David Persing, we found that ticks from the South Fork of Long Island collected in 1945 were infected. Subsequent studies found that mice from Cape Cod, collected in 1896, were infected.
So decades before Lyme was identified – and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it – the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild. That alone is proof that the conspiracy theory is wrong. But there are plenty of other lines of evidence that show why Lyme disease did not require the human hand changing something Mother Nature had nurtured.
I teach a graduate course in biodefense. Biowarfare, the use of biological agents to cause harm, was once an interest of the U.S. military and that of many other countries.
One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers. The bacteria that cause Lyme disease are not in this category.
Many of the agents that biowarfare research has focused on are transmitted by ticks, mosquitoes, or other arthropods: plague, tularemia, Q fever, Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever, Eastern equine encephalitis or Russian spring summer encephalitis. In all of them, the early disease is very debilitating, and the fatality rate can be great; 30% of Eastern equine encephalitis cases die. Epidemic typhus killed 3 million people during World War I.
Lyme disease does make some people very sick but many have just a flu-like illness that their immune system fends off. Untreated cases may subsequently develop arthritis or neurological issues. The disease is rarely lethal. Lyme has a weeklong incubation period – too slow for an effective bioweapon.
And, even though European physicians had described cases of Lyme disease in the first half of the 20th century, the cause had not been identified. There was no way the military could have manipulated it because they did not know what “it” was. None of us knew – until 1981, when the late Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist, made his serendipitous discovery.
Source: No, Conspiracy Theorists, Lyme Disease Is Not An Escaped Military Bioweapon
30 May 2019, 2:57 pm
