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Could Lyme Disease in the United States be the result of an accidental release of a secret biological weapons experiment? Could the army have specifically designed the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive – and then let it escape somehow from the lab and spread into nature? ?
Is that the reason why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed each year with this potentially debilitating disease?
This is an old conspiracy theory that is currently experiencing a resurgence with many sensational titles and tweets. Even Congress ordered the Pentagon to reveal whether it used ticks or not.
And that's not true.
Ticks can indeed carry infectious agents that can be used as biological weapons. Military research has long been focused on ticks. The sites around Long Island Sound, near the Plum Island Military Research Lab, were among the first places where the American Lyme disease outbreak was identified.
But no Lyme disease agent or other agent has been released by the military on US soil.
I started working on Lyme Disease in 1985. As part of my Ph.D. thesis, I was studying whether museum specimens of ticks and mice contained evidence of infection by the disease. Bacterial agent of Lyme disease before the first known American human cases known 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 revealed that Cape Cod mice, collected in 1896, were infected.
Thus, decades before Lyme is identified – and before military scientists can tamper with it or turn it into a weapon – the bacteria that causes it live in the wild. This alone proves that the conspiracy theory is false. But there is plenty of other evidence that shows why Lyme disease did not require the human hand to change something that Mother Nature had fed.
Lyme is an unlikely biological weapon
I teach a postgraduate course in biodefense. Biological warfare, the use of biological agents to cause damage, was of interest to the US military and many other countries.
One of the most important features of a biological warfare agent is its ability to quickly disable targeted soldiers. The bacteria responsible for Lyme disease do not fall into this category.
Most of the agents on which biological warfare research is concentrated are transmitted by ticks, mosquitoes or other arthropods: plague, tularemia, Q fever, Congo Crimean haemorrhagic fever, equine encephalitis. Eastern or Russian encephalitis of spring summer. In all cases, early disease is very debilitating and the mortality rate can be high; 30% of equine encephalitis cases of East die. Epidemic typhus killed 3 million people during the First World War.
Lyme disease makes some people very sick, but many suffer only from an illness resembling the flu that their immune system repels. Untreated cases may later develop arthritis or neurological problems. The disease is rarely fatal. Lyme has an incubation period of one week – too slow for an effective biological weapon.
And, although European doctors described cases of Lyme disease in the first half of the 20th century, the cause had not been identified. It was out of the question that the military handled it because they did not know what it was. None of us knew it – until 1981, when the late Willy Burgdorfer, a medical entomologist, made his fortuitous discovery.
Burgdorfer discovery of Lyme bacteria
Burgdorfer was educated in Switzerland in the late 1940s and studied the biology of tick-borne recurrent fever, a bacterial disease that can be transmitted from animals to humans. During this work, he developed new methods for detecting tick infection and for infecting ticks with specific doses of a pathogen. These methods are still used today by people like me.
Finally, Burgdorfer moved to Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana, an outpost of the US Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health – at the time, the world's center for tick research.
Burgdorfer's unique expertise was to study the adaptation of microbial agents to the internal tissues of their hosts, using experimental infections and microscopy. Up to Lyme disease, he was renowned as the world's expert in the life cycle of the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
NIH, CC BY
It's RMSF that drove Burgdorfer to the cause of Lyme disease. He was working to better understand RMSF on Long Island in New York. Why were dog ticks, the recognized vector, not infected even in areas where people were getting sick? He knew that a new tick, the deer tick, had recently become common on Long Island and had been incriminated as a vector of illness.
Burgdorfer therefore asked his colleague Jorge Benach of Stony Brook University to ask for ticks to control the presence of RMSF bacteria. Benach had some of Shelter Island that he sent with him.
By testing the "blood" of deer ticks, Burgdorfer has not found any RMSF bacteria. But he found spiral-shaped bacteria called spirochetes. The spirochetes were very similar to what he had studied as a graduate student: the cause of a recurring fever. If spirochetes provoked a recurrent fever, other spirochetes may have been behind the new and mysterious Lyme arthritis whose cause was not known.
This ah-ha moment led to the 1982 historical document in Science with a title question: "Lyme Disease – a tick-borne spirochetosis?
The conspiracy theory can not account for the facts
Some have over-badyzed the fact that Lyme disease spirochetes were first discovered in ticks on Shelter Island in New York, just off Plum Island, an isolated facility used as a military research laboratory until 1954 .
But it is only by coincidence that the ticks of Benach and Shelter Island were those in which Burgdorfer made his fortuitous discoveries. In 1984, once researchers knew what to look for, spirochetes from Lyme disease had been found in ticks in coastal Connecticut, New Jersey, and even California.
But suppose the army started working immediately on the new Lyme disease agent discovered in 1981. It was a long time after the Fort Terry Plum Island was transformed in 1954 by the State Department of Agriculture. United States to study exotic animal diseases. It was also after President Richard Nixon banned research on biowarfare in 1969. If the bacterium was manipulated, it probably was after 1981 – so the conspiracy theory calendar does not work.
The real highlight in the idea that Lyme disease in the United States would have been accidentally released from military research on weapons of war lies in the fact that the first case of Lyme disease in the US is not from Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the early 1970s. In 1969, a physician identified a case in Spooner, Wisconsin, in a patient who had never left this area. And Lyme disease was found infecting people in 1978 in northern California.
How can accidental release occur at three remote sites? It could not.
Population genetics research on Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacterial agent of Lyme disease, suggests that bacteria in the north-east, west-central, and california are separated by geographic barriers that prevent these populations from mixing. If there had been an escaped laboratory strain in the last 50 years, particularly a strain designed to be more transmissible, the genetic similarity would be greater between these three geographic populations. There is no evidence of a recent single source – such as a laboratory release – of spirochetes from Lyme disease.
The real reasons why the epidemic has become so heavy are reforestation, suburbanization and lack of management of deer herds.
The conspiracy thinkers place a high value on the military's interest in tick-borne infections and its influence on the best researchers. Until the onset of Lyme disease, the number of tick laboratories in the world could be counted with both hands. As a recognized expert on ticks and the infections they transmit, it is certainly possible that Willy Burgdorfer will receive funds from the army, undertake studies or consult them. They were one of the few sources of research funding for tick projects from 1950 to 1980. The primary focus of this applied work would have been to understand the tick-related risks that American soldiers faced during their deployment and how to protect them.
Whether Burgdorfer has referred to biowarfare or biodefense programs during interviews towards the end of his life should not be interpreted as an admission of participation in a top secret job. I've met Burgdorfer many times and I've been struck by his sense of ironic humor. I imagine his hint of a bigger story than he did for the army was a way for a joker to play with the investigator.
As a person who has worked for more than three decades to understand the epidemiology and ecology of Lyme disease to reduce the risk of infection by Americans, I am appalled by the fact that this theory of conspiracy is taken seriously, which now participates in the Congress. The idea that Lyme disease is due to poor research in the field of biological weapons is easily refuted. Our lawmakers could better spend their time fighting the disease instead of investigating a far-fetched story based on misinterpretation and innuendo.
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Sam Telford, Professor of Infectious Diseases and Global Health, Tufts University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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