Did Lyme Disease Start as a Bioweapon?

There’s been a call for investigation into the history of Lyme disease, and whether it might’ve been an accidentally released bioweapon. Learn both sides of the debate in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Ticks are vectors for all sorts
of unpleasant germs, notably lined sas, which is the sixth
most commonly reported infectious disease in the United States, according
to these Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Decades after

(00:22):
it was first identified, it's still often misdiagnosed. Symptoms include
an expanding body, rash, joint pains, fatigue, chills, and fever.
But could the spread of line disease be attributable to
a classified, decades old bioweapons program as some people claim,
or are ticks just as good for spreading misinformation as
they are for germs. The ticks as weapons issue made

(00:45):
headlines back in July nineteen thanks to the U. S.
House of Representatives Chris Smith, who introduced legislation directing the
Department of Defense to review claims that the Pentagon researched
tick based bioweapons in the mid twentieth century. The amendment
past told the House he was inspired to do this
by quote a number of books and articles suggesting that

(01:05):
significant research had been done at U. S government facilities,
including Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and Plumb Island, New York, to
turn ticks and other insects into bio weapons. Smith explained
during a debate on the House floor quote with lime
disease and other tipboorn diseases exploding in the United States,
with an estimated three hundred thousand to four hundred thirty
seven hundred thousand new cases diagnosed each year and ten

(01:27):
to twenty of all patients suffering from chronic lime disease,
Americans have a right to know whether any of this
is true and have these experiments caused lime disease and
other tickborn diseases to mutate and to spread. Congressman Smith's
legislative actions were also inspired partly by the book Bitten,
The Secret History of Lime Disease and Biological Weapons, written

(01:48):
by Chris Nuby, a Stanford University science writer who also
served as a senior producer on a lime disease documentary
titled Under Our Skin. In the book, Nuby points out
that in nine three, the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort
Dietrich created a program investigating ways to spread anti personnel
agents via arthropods, that is, insects, crustaceans and arachnids, with

(02:11):
the idea that slow acting agents wouldn't immediately incapacitated soldiers,
but rather make the area dangerous for a long period
of time. We spoke with newbi via email. She said,
the premise of my book is that weaponized ticks full
of who knows what, were accidentally released in the region
of Long Island Sound. While she notes that she was

(02:31):
unable to prove definitively line bacteria was used as a bioweapon, quote,
there are plenty of shocking discoveries and scientific leads to
lift the veil on the mysteries surrounding tick diseases and
the government's response to them. Her book says that scientist
Willie Bergdorfer, who is credited with discovering the specific bacterium
that causes line disease, was directly involved in a number

(02:53):
of bioweapons programs, but she stopped short of saying that
his research was necessarily related to a lime disease weapon
was accidentally released into the wild. Given America's ugly history
regarding unethical research, it's fair to ask whether lyme disease
was inadvertently or advertently introduced into the general population. After all,
the government conducted hundreds of germ warfare tests and unethical

(03:16):
experiments on civilians in the mid twentieth century, and other
examples of similar biological warfare do exist. During World War Two,
Japan notoriously used plague infested insects to spread disease, particularly
in China. Some twenty thousand Chinese people died from this
type of etymological warfare, which was carried out primarily by
the infamous Unit seven thirty one, But most experts say

(03:39):
there's nothing to investigate regarding ticks in the US today.
Philip J. Baker, executive director at the American Lime Disease Foundation,
wrote a lengthy document debunking claims regarding lime disease bioweapons research.
In it, he established that both lime and the tics
that spread it were prevalent in the Northeast thousands of
years before Europeans colonized the continent. Baker told us via email,

(04:02):
I think it would be a complete waste of the
taxpayer's money for Congress to waste its time investigating science fiction.
His article notes that pathogens considered for bioweapons are usually
ones that caused death or serious illness. In a short
period of time after release that does not describe the
lime disease pathogen. Also, the idea that the government tried

(04:22):
to weaponize ticks with lime in the nineteen fifties and
sixties doesn't fit the disease timeline, and an article published
in The Conversation, Sam Telford, a professor of infectious disease
and global health at Tufts University, pointed out that lime
wasn't even discovered into that's when Willie Bergdorfer finally pinpointed
spiral shaped bacteria called spiro keets, which were ultimately named

(04:45):
as the cause of lime. Telford wrote the real mail
in the Coffin for the idea that lime disease in
the US was somehow accidentally released from military bioweapons research
is to be found in the fact that the first
American case of lime disease turns out not to have
been for old lime Connecticut in the early nineteen seventies.
In nineteen sixty nine, a physician identified a case in Spooner,

(05:06):
Wisconsin and a patient who had never traveled out of
that area, and lime disease was found infecting people in
nineteen seventy eight in northern California. How could an accidental
release take place over three distant locations, it couldn't. Telford
said that growing dear populations which spread deer ticks carrying lime, reforestation,
particularly in the northeastern United States where most cases of

(05:29):
lime are reported, and suburbs encroaching on those forests, which
brings humans into close contact with ticks and tick invested wildlife,
are the primary reasons that lime is becoming more prevalent.
Not a top secret bioweapons program, however, provided an organization
wanted to weaponize ticks, it's certainly possible, but it's not easy.

(05:50):
We also spoke via email with Carry Clark, a professor
of epidemiology and environmental health at the University of North Florida.
He said weaponizing almost any type of bio logical agent
takes a great deal of expertise. How much expertise depends
on the specific agent, It's entire ecology and epidemiology, including
pathogenic properties, infectivity, pathogenicity, virulence, and in this case, its

(06:13):
ability to survive in and be transmitted by ticks. Clark
adds that ticks aren't an ideal choice as a biological
weapons delivery system. Ticks don't typically thrive in urban environments
where people are concentrated and they are slow feeders, so
someone might notice and remove them before they can do
their job. Clark explained one would also have to rear

(06:35):
and infect a large number of ticks and then somehow
deliver them to a group of humans in a way
that large numbers of people are exposed and actually bitten
in a short period of time. Dropping infected ticks from
an airplane or drone doesn't sound like an efficient way
to incapacity to population with a bioweapon. He noted that
lime disease isn't quick or efficient at incapacitating people, that

(06:57):
it wouldn't be likely to cause a large number of deaths,
and that it might take months to cause even serious illness.
Clark further explained that even though there's an epidemic of
lime like illnesses in the United States and that many
may result from tick bites, infections from tick bites aren't
necessarily lyme disease. They could be caused by other tickborn
pathogens or by infectious agents encountered in our environment in

(07:19):
other ways besides tick bites. Perhaps the takeaway is that
given the seriousness of tick borne illnesses, the existence or
non existence of a murky government conspiracy and cover up
doesn't really matter as much as the fact that patients
are still sick and the disease is still spreading. What
we really need, says Clark, is to invest significant additional

(07:40):
funding to investigate the true causes of these illnesses and
to develop better diagnostics and treatments. Today's episode was written
by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler clang. A brain
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(08:02):
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