On the link between Lyme disease and bioweapons (2019)

I&#x27;m confused by the number of upvotes this article has. It&#x27;s a mishmash of innuendos and barely-related facts. I thought Lithub was a better website than this.<p>As far as I can tell, the narrative of this article is &quot;the CIA did some real-world tests of how harmless bacterial spores propagate in a real-world environment; they also did closed-lab tests of how harmful bacterial droplets for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever propagate in a controlled environment among monkeys; a botched chemical weapons experiment ended US offensive chemical and bio warfare research; then a specific researcher had some family troubles, the end.&quot; It appears to be structured to imply that an outbreak of tick-born illnesses in Long Island in 1968 is <i>not a coincidence</i>.<p>Maybe the full book is a different story, but this seems like pretty bad conspiracy theoretic stringing together of tangential things.

In this thread, the argument that chronic Lyme&#x27;s disease does not exist, seems to repeat itself. It may very well be that chronic Lyme&#x27;s disease does not exist, but the arguments that claim this still appear to miss some key points.<p>The argument that chronic Lyme&#x27;s disease does not exist relies on the existence of a reliable test for Lyme&#x27;s disease. The article questions the existence of such a test. If the tests are not reliable, any research that uses the tests to deduce that chronic Lyme&#x27;s disease does not exist, is not reliable either.<p>There are researchers that believe in the existence of the chronic Lyme&#x27;s disease. They have some arguments on why it is difficult to test, eradicate and even understand Lyme&#x27;s disease.<p>First argument is that Lyme&#x27;s disease is actually an amalgam of several diseases that work synergetically, such as borreliosis, babesiosis and bartonella. If you are cure one, the others take over, and make the body more suspective for the re-emergence of the cured disease.<p>Second argument is that apparently the side effects of the diseases are not actually caused by the disease itself, but poisons released during the die-off of the disease. This is called Herxheimer reaction. So, more you are able to cure, the worse you feel, initially. That is why it is difficult to recognize what is helpful in curing the disease and what is harmful.<p>Third argument is that borreliosis has been observed (by microscope) to change form, and &quot;hide&quot; within other micro-organisms and blood cells. Spiral form is only one of the forms. Perhaps antibiotics can only cure some of the forms?

Lyme apparently has been proven to be in the wild since time immemorial and thus the headline is nonsense.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencealert.com&#x2F;congress-is-investigating-whether-the-us-actually-infected-americans-with-lyme-disease" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencealert.com&#x2F;congress-is-investigating-wheth...</a>

&gt;the condition was named Lyme disease. A conspiracy theory spread like a fever: that the researchers at Plum Island had engineered a new sickness, one that now afflicts more than 30,000 Americans per year.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defenseone.com&#x2F;threats&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;did-us-invent-lyme-disease-1960s-house-aims-find-out&#x2F;158529&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.defenseone.com&#x2F;threats&#x2F;2019&#x2F;07&#x2F;did-us-invent-lym...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debugyourhealth.com&#x2F;lyme-disease-cure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;debugyourhealth.com&#x2F;lyme-disease-cure&#x2F;</a><p><i>&gt; Why would a PhD from MIT start debugging her family’s health ... Learn how we went from debilitating chronic Lyme Disease to radiant health. No practitioners were able to help us, so we had to figure it out on our own. Many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, this website summarizes everything we learned along the way. The quest for a Lyme disease cure led us to health better than we have ever had before we contracted Lyme.</i>

This is trite bullshit, debunked for years.<p>&quot;The U.S. Department of Agriculture has repeated it several times since the book came out: no one has ever worked on Lyme disease on Plum Island. Eric Traub himself never conducted any research there. He simply visited the site! He wasn&#x27;t a tick specialist, but a foot-and-mouth disease specialist. Pressed by an Associated Press journalist, Michael C. Carroll admitted back in 2004 that he had &quot;no direct evidence &quot;2 of his claims.<p>The strongest argument in support of this thesis is in fact a simple geographical coincidence. Lyme, the small Connecticut town that gave its name to the disease, is located in Connecticut, a few dozen kilometers from Plum Island, as the crow flies. It was here, in 1975, that researchers drew up a summary of what they called &quot;Lyme arthritis&quot;. They had observed an unusual recrudescence of oligoarthritis in children, and attributed it to tick-borne bacteria of the Borrelia genus.<p>In fact, these researchers were not the first to observe what was to become Lyme disease. Other outbreaks were scattered across Europe and North America, thousands of miles from Plum Island.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afis.org&#x2F;Maladie-de-Lyme-L-Obs-a-retrouve-le-coupable" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.afis.org&#x2F;Maladie-de-Lyme-L-Obs-a-retrouve-le-cou...</a><p>Disappointing to see many fall for it. &quot;Do your own research&quot;, but for real, please.

If one has good evidence of the sort of thesis hinted at, one should state it straightforwardly and present the evidence for it perspicuously, rather than darkly hinting as the first section does, which style rather suggests the evidence to follow is weak and only convincing through obfuscation.

This is not new ground, there was a mediocre book that makes most of the same allegations, but more focused on plum island called lab 257 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;385040.Lab_257" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;385040.Lab_257</a>)<p>While not a great book, there were two elements I found compelling 1) a heat map of Lyme prevalence can basically be drawn with plum island at the center, 2) the us government did bio weapons tests, using ticks as a disease vector, on ways of killing an enemy’s livestock supply (and hence crippling their food supply).

There should be greater concern over the recent return in surge of Malaria, Leprosy and now West Nile Virus<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insider.com&#x2F;mosquitos-with-west-nile-virus-becoming-immune-bug-spray-2023-8" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.insider.com&#x2F;mosquitos-with-west-nile-virus-becom...</a>

&gt; While most Lyme disease patients who are diagnosed and treated early can fully recover, 10 to 20 percent suffer from persistent symptoms, some seriously disabling.<p>There&#x27;s no evidence that chronic Lyme exists:<p>&gt; There is no evidence to suggest that “chronic Lyme” exists, or that long-term antibiotics are required to treat it.<p>(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sciencebasedmedicine.org&#x2F;avoid-prolonged-antibiotics-for-chronic-lyme&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sciencebasedmedicine.org&#x2F;avoid-prolonged-antibiotics...</a>)<p>It&#x27;s pseudoscientific and pretty dangerous nonsense at that.

Sounds like the lab leak theory for that novel coronavirus being the result of gain-of-function research.<p>Who could be taken in by a canard like that? Coronaviruses emerge naturally and jump species sometimes, it was probably the wet market near the biolab studying that virus that it crossed species at.

I grew up in the town the disease is named after, I know it&#x27;s a real thing, but if I had to go by the absolute nonsense that&#x27;s posted about it on the internet I&#x27;m not sure I would.

I read this book a few years ago and really enjoyed it. Many things to say but one thing, why do books like this have to mention JFK somewhere in there.

I wonder if we are going to see airborne HIV eventually. Because, why not? It would be very reproductively succesful.