Apologies if this has been done before but it’s new to me & I’m aware that there are a number of folk on here with more than a passing interest in Lyme Disease.

I came across this article in The Independent that gives a rather alarming new twist to ticks & Lyme Disease.

The suggestion is that following WWII the American military may have ‘weaponized’ ticks as disease carrying mechanisms in biological warfare experiment and that some of these ticks may have made it out of the laboratory. The article references some Lyme Disease publications and talks about Lyme Disease in general, the implication being that the two may be linked (it’s unclear whether Lyme Disease may have been the pathogen the ticks were meant to carry or whether weaponized ticks may have interacted with and affected natural ticks).

It seems to be speculation at present but serious enough for US lawmakers to vote to force disclosure from the Pentagon. It may be interesting to see how this plays out.

The US military tried all sort of wacky stuff post WWII, apparently. Have a read of Jon Ronson’s ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’.

Seems unlikely that Borrelia would be your pathogen of choice, given that the chances of successful and debilitating infection are relatively small, incubation can be lengthy, and ticks in general are less likely to be effective against soldiers wearing fatigues.

I can understand that an illness that was only properly identified in the 1970s and has spread like wildfire since might spark a few conspiracy theories though.

Let me just go and find my tin foil hat

You need your tin foil suit for this one. Remember to tuck the legs into your tin foil socks.

Right up the street of our Lyme advocacy groups this one, unfortunately.

Could a tick-borne illness spread around the globe I wonder, given that Lyme is found throughout the Northern hemishpere, and not communicable person to person AFAIK?

Whatever the source, the CIA or natural causes, it is interesting when you hear people who grew up in the country in the 60s and 70s say they used to get ticks left right and centre. Kids played games to see who could get the most on their arms, burned them off with cigarettes etc etc and no one was ever ill.

I don’t think Lyme Disease has “spread like wildfire”, maybe better awareness. NICE report approximately 1000 cases per year, hardly an epidemic.

Other animals are host to a variety of viruses that can be harmful to humans, there just needs to be a means of transmission between species and biting insects happen to be that means.

The problem with biological “weapons” like this is that they are both indiscriminate and uncontrollable. With Lyme Disease you also have the problem of initiating the infection and spreading it through the target population. It’s also very variable as to its effects – some people are severely debilitated but others have only mild symptoms and might not even know they have it.

given that Lyme is found throughout the Northern hemishpere, and not communicable person to person AFAIK?

The jury’s out on that.

I don’t think Lyme Disease has “spread like wildfire”, maybe better awareness. NICE report approximately 1000 cases per year, hardly an epidemic.

No records are kept of those of us who’ve had no alternative but to be tested overseas in an attempt to find out what’s wrong with us. USA 300,000 infected per year, Germany 90,000 and France 33,000. RIPL have been found to be telling porkies when patients have had to make Freedom of Information requests and we’re not talking one or two people here either. The UK Lyme support group I belong to was started 5 years ago and currently has over 10,000 members. Successive Governments have deliberately ignored Lyme disease for decades and instead prefer to follow the CDC doctrine.

The suggestion is that following WWII the American military may have ‘weaponized’ ticks as disease carrying mechanisms in biological warfare experiment and that some of these ticks may have made it out of the laboratory.

Sounds completely implausible, probably the slowest and least effective delivery mechanism you could think of. Bearing in mind they had mustard gas shells in WW1, so already had experience of deploying agents by missile / shell and kept developing this till it was all banned.

NB If you want a terrifying read, try The Dead Hand, as well as nuclear stuff it details Russia’s covert biological warfare programme in the cold war, which was on an absolutely epic scale – in both lethality and quantity of agents they produced. When the Russians inspected the decommissioned US factory they found rusting germination vessels of a few 100 litres and spoke to the handful of US experts in Antrax. The USSR had brand new stainless steel germination vessels 5 stories high and had 1000s of scientists working on each pathogen (all in contravention of the band and in secret).

It seems to be speculation

Yes, it certainly does.

Meanwhile TBE marches on across Europe.
How many of you holidaying in Europe will have been vaccinated against it or heard of it?
See list of recommended countries here.
https://www.tickalert.org/am-i-risk-tbe?gclid=Cj0KCQjwjrvpBRC0ARIsAFrFuV8BwdtEnt9R18_ScrDXPgmtwYfVS03h5BINPxjoZMyW9JqL9XCjIIQaAosHEALw_wcB

Kids played games to see who could get the most on their arms, burned them off with cigarettes etc etc and no one was ever ill.

No-one linked illness to the ticks, but that doesn’t mean no-one was ill. People get ‘flu’ and ‘a virus’ all the time, even now there are plenty of mystery illnesses where no-one knows the cause, I’d imagine there were just as many back then if not more. Even when Lyme’s is known about now it’s still uncommon, most tick bites don’t cause it.

What we don’t know is how many people get bitten by ticks each year. Some may not know they’ve been bitten, if it’s a nymph then it may attach, feed and drop off without the person realising.

Regardless of whether it’s accurate or not, let’s go with the NICE figure of 1000 new cases per year. What do you class as “rare” or uncommon? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? If the latter then that means 1 million people get bitten by ticks every year.

I grew up on a South Lakes farm and we didn’t really have a tick problem until my father bought a plot of fell land next door. It was known locally for being bad for ticks, it is next to a large forestry area so deer would sustain any ticks on the land. After buying the land our sheep became infested and we’d have to dip them for ticks twice a year. I’ve seen lambs with over a hundred ticks on them, so many that their blood was ‘watery” due to the amount of anticoagulant released by the ticks. Yet we rarely got ticks on us, maybe one a year.

Of course we’d be walking around the land wearing working clothing not trainers and shorts so there was a physical barrier to the ticks.

I agree with footflaps, sounds like nonsense to me.

Using insects as carriers is I guess plausible, but why would you use ticks, which require hosts to transport them any distance? Just seems like it would be too slow to win a war or anything.

I agree with footflaps, sounds like nonsense to me.

It may well be, although I thought that the House Of Representatives’ vote for disclosure gave it some credence.

Just because it’s a crackpot idea though doesn’t mean that the US Military wouldn’t experiment with it, they certainly looked into employing psychic phenomenon and remote viewing.

Here is the thing …. why would the CIA bother? Sounds like pure conspiracy theory to me…
(if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc)
There are better creatures to weaponise. Dogs for example …
Or may killer bees?
Then there is always anthrax, smallpox and ebola. For it to be an effective weapon then the deployer as to be able to protect against it / innoculate. Are ticks selective? … or do all anti american terroists hang about in long wet grass?
Drones are more effective i taking out baddies that ticks …

The tick lifecycle is short, so it’s ability to evolve is quite quick … just perhaps it s environmental change that has made Lyme’s more common. But unlikely that it is the CIA…

It may well be, although I thought that the House Of Representatives’ vote for disclosure gave it some credence.

Sadly not.

Pretty sure we had one MP ask the Government, in the chamber of commons, what the MoD plans were for a Zombie Apocalypse…

EDIT: That was the Canadian parliament…

What we don’t know is how many people get bitten by ticks each year. Some may not know they’ve been bitten, if it’s a nymph then it may attach, feed and drop off without the person realising.

Interestingly in the Lyme support group there’s a fair number with autoimmune conditions. Also some of those who’ve been diagnosed with ME/CFS turn out to have Lyme disease.

t is interesting when you hear people who grew up in the country in the 60s and 70s say they used to get ticks left right and centre. Kids played games to see who could get the most on their arms, burned them off with cigarettes etc etc and no one was ever ill

That is why they are called emerging diseases. Look at HIV, the filioviruses, SARS, Rift Valley fever, lassa fever, Zika virus. All were first described in the last century.

What good would it be as a weapon ?

What good would it be as a weapon ?

Imagine if a debilitating disease became endemic in Russia. It’s not going to win you a battle but it might help with a 30-year Cold War.

it is interesting when you hear people who grew up in the country in the 60s and 70s say they used to get ticks left right and centre. Kids played games to see who could get the most on their arms, burned them off with cigarettes etc etc and no one was ever ill.

Yes and you hear the stories about how they’d play in abandoned buildings, building sites, train tracks and ride their bikes on the road but did them no harm. The dead tend not to post as much on Facebook.

The dead tend not to post as much on Facebook.

It’s only the 70s!

I rode by bike in building sites in the 70s, still posting cat memes on FB…

Probably got bitten by ticks as well.

Makes you think……

it is interesting when you hear people who grew up in the country in the 60s and 70s say they used to get ticks left right and centre. Kids played games to see who could get the most on their arms, burned them off with cigarettes etc etc and no one was ever ill.

I was one of those kids, in deepest darkest Argyll early 80’s we’d spend all day building tunnels through bracken and romping through the heather collecting as many ticks as possible, the winner was the person with the most amount of ticks attached, another game was to scratch our forearm with a thorn and place a tick on to it then once it has secured itself we’d see how long and how fat we could grow the tick before it fell off or our parents found it as part of the de-ticking ritual we had to go through every night – think my record was 28 ticks, Leeches were also a thing with us……our legs used to run with blood…..growing up in the arse end of nowhere was great fun.

Come to think of it i do now have a neurological illness, progressive MS….perhaps i should get tested but from what i understand the current NHS testing procedure is not fit for purpose.

Yes and you hear the stories about how they’d play in abandoned buildings, building sites, train tracks and ride their bikes on the road but did them no harm. The dead tend not to post as much on Facebook.

I did all that when young but only got ticks when I moved to the New Forest at age 30. If I was on Facebook I could post all about it. In 20 years I have had one and wife has had one yet dogs can get them as soon as they go wandering off. We have always been on high alert of them though as Lyme’s is quite high in New Forest.

Yeah I did all that too and got tick bites galore. You lot are harder as I ran around in a circle screaming until somebody took it off. Still do to be honest….bad year for them this year,I had seven after a recent DoE practise.

Yet we rarely got ticks on us, maybe one a year.

sheep are so effective at picking up ticks they’re used as ‘tick mops’ in land management. One of the more ‘fun’ maps I’ve had to make in a past job included mapping the locations said tick mops would be deployed and getting to create a fun tick symbol for the map.

Just spotted this headline on the Echo website https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/17838683.new-forest-revealed-second-highest-number-cases-lymes-disease-uk/

This was an excellent read – slightly long, American based, but good

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/life-with-lyme/594736/

I pulled a tick out of my 3 year old last night. He was freaking out as couldn’t feel it but could see it. Thank goodness I got proper tick removers.

I have had 3 in the last 12 months, including one whose head was initially left in me when it was removed (and either coincidence or not I had loads of symptoms) causing me to go on strong antibiotics.

Basterding things.

Just spotted this headline on the Echo website

Paper here:

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/7/e028064?fbclid=IwAR3YbePkYshlEQWqEn8r23W24p635g8tY6g1a6uf2gIGyrpnv0oHBPAn_DA

Another here:

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7245-8?fbclid=IwAR3ad8ngyWtZMTJt5t8-GB2bsj8nLrWoZqFnUfdQM5nzkDisEHlHxUB2WZg

Whilst I haven’t yet glanced at these, I understand there is concern that the press have created misleading headlines which don’t stand up to scrutiny.

This was an excellent read – slightly long, American based, but good

+1

I enjoyed that.

+2, good writer – ty for the link petec.

Free yourself from the ideology of Lyme – Allen Steere. The Master speaks.

Not sure if someone has already linked this?

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49998344
“Long-term Lyme disease ‘actually chronic fatigue syndrome”

Dr Matthew Dryden, a consultant microbiologist at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said he was also concerned about the issue of “chronic” Lyme disease.
“These are reported as true cases of Lyme when almost certainly they’re not. The symptoms are very real but most medical tests tend to be normal which confuses both doctors and patients.”

I’m aware of this unfortunately. Yep, so I’m just feeling tired and all these other symptoms that stop me from having a life must be in my head.

Dryden is not an expert and has been known to use derogatory terms towards Lyme disease patients. Medical tests are notoriously unreliable and anyway it’s a clinical diagnosis. The Government has been offered around £1M towards research by John Caudwell yet they are deliberately sweeping it under the carpet.

I’m just feeling tired and all these other symptoms that stop me from having a life must be in my head.

I’m sure it’s unintentional but that reads as if you’re dismissing CFS as being merely “tired and in your head”.

Sorry scotroutes, brain fog again. No, I didn’t mean that at all and am aware that CFS is a very real condition.

Long-term Lyme disease ‘actually chronic fatigue syndrome

I was speculating the reverse, that CFS was actually Lyme – I have no medical knowledge, just trying to understand why chronic fatigue should suddenly affect an active person, but if the medical experts think otherwise I’m probably wrong.

Sorry scotroutes, brain fog again. No, I didn’t mean that at all and am aware that CFS is a very real condition.

Yeah, I thought that.

I was speculating the reverse, that CFS was actually Lyme – I have no medical knowledge, just trying to understand why chronic fatigue should suddenly affect an active person, but if the medical experts think otherwise I’m probably wrong.

Yes, there are people who’ve been diagnosed with either ME, CFS or Fibromyalgia who’ve turned out to have Lyme disease. Also, in my experience, there can be other reasons besides Lyme for an active person becoming inactive.