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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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
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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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
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 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 Stuff is a production of I Heart Radios Has Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other topics, visit our home in it how stuffworks dot com and for more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.