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Ticks With Lyme Disease Are Pentagon Experiment

Eponastill

Justified & Ancient
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I'd have thought ticks were quite capable of spreading disease all by themselves, but there's a theory (maybe not a theory, what shall we call it, a conspiracy?) that in the 50s the US government were experimenting with ticks as a bioweapon, and that these escaped / were deliberately released, and there was an explosion of Lyme disease in the population.
My main problem is that Lyme disease is hardly fast-acting. If you're trying to get rid of people, you might want to try something a bit quicker and more fatal.

Anyway the House of Representatives has approved an ammendment "instructing the defence department’s inspector general to conduct a review of whether the US experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975”.

Besides I think we have ticks with Lyme disease in the UK so I don't really know how that fits in :)

Sensitivity Warning: You will have to read the words 'weaponised ticks'. Weaponised. I know it's a word. But I don't like it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/16/pentagon-review-weaponised-ticks-lyme-disease
 
My main problem is that Lyme disease is hardly fast-acting. If you're trying to get rid of people, you might want to try something a bit quicker and more fatal.

That'd still fit the theory though, as the first attempt might involve spreading an easily-engineered and non-fatal disease.
 
Supposedly we don't have ticks with Lyme disease here in Australia, however I have known two people who've had it, both by tick bite. One had traveled overseas. One had not. One spent a vast sum of money visiting Switzerland for a 6 week treatment, one did not. Neither are the person (physically) that they were before becoming ill.
 
It wouldn't surprise me if bio-warfare researchers had considered ticks as vectors during that period, but there's little reason to believe it had any specific connection to Lyme disease.

The use of deliberately spread pestilence in warfare dates back centuries.

The general notion of breeding and releasing infected insects, etc., as mass-produced bio-weapons has been considered or promoted since the role of such beasties in spreading major diseases was discovered (basically the 19th century onward).

Lyme disease apparently didn't start in North America, and it's clearly not a recent development. Written descriptions of tick-related symptoms consistent with Lyme disease are known from as early as the 17th century in the UK. Museum specimens of ticks infected with the Lyme-causing spirochetes have been verified from as early as the late 19th century in Europe.

The body of Ötzi the Iceman contained verified Lyme spirochete DNA sequences.

The relevance of the year 1975 lies in the fact that's the year the medical community finally connected all the longstanding dots and identified Lyme disease as a specific illness. Given the generally slow-acting nature of the disease, it's likely the sudden onset of Lyme paranoia from the 1970's onward had more to do with the coalescence of its recognition rather than any "explosion" of actual cases.

In any case, Lyme disease is a poor candidate for a bioweapon. It's too slow-acting, it requires victims to be / go where the ticks are, the ticks don't travel far or spread quickly, and the ticks don't reproduce nearly as quickly / massively as other disease-carrying arthropods.
 
I got a tick attached to my leg a few years ago, made an arse of removing it (I later learned that apparently you need to ‘unscrew’ them by twisting clockwise as their mouths are left-hand threaded) and had to go to hospital to have the remaining bits taken out after my inept attempts failed. It was horrible.
 
Really? I thought it was anti clockwise.
That's how I got the dog's out. The head came out.

I'm going to have to check this. That's very worrying.
 
Ticks are really common here in Sweden and anyone spending the summer in the countrysode is advised to get a jab against getting Encephalitis. It can also cause meningitis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

The recommended tick removal method here is to use tweezers, press down into the skin and grab the head of the tick as low down as possible. Pull it straight out (no twisting). It's OK if a bit of the head stays in, your body will reject it.
 
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T'other year on our usual summer holiday trip, one of our dogs got a tick. We tried a new method which we'd seen online beforehand (we knew we were going to a sheepy area so we'd researched beforehand if there were any ways of removing them rather than the usual frontline), and lo and behold it actually worked:

https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-remove-a-tick/

Basically: make the tick dizzy! :D

Requires a bit of patience (and suspension of ick-factor) to sit there and do this, but we did and it worked... tick eventually just detached itself, completely intact, no bits left in. We did wear disposable gloves to do this, to avoid directly touching Mr Tick (once he came off onto our finger we just removed the gloves, inside out, with him still inside... all neatly packaged :)

I can't vouch for if this would work all the time, but the fact that it worked the first time we tried it, says a lot I think.
 
Lab 257 is a great book about Plum Island and Lyme Disease.

Actually Lyme disease is a great bio-weapon because left untreated it leads to severe disability and to suicide. It takes little man power to drop ticks on an unsuspecting enemy, and let the ticks do their nasty work. I couldn't walk for months, because of Lyme disease.
 
Lab 257 is a great book about Plum Island and Lyme Disease.

Actually Lyme disease is a great bio-weapon because left untreated it leads to severe disability and to suicide. It takes little man power to drop ticks on an unsuspecting enemy, and let the ticks do their nasty work. I couldn't walk for months, because of Lyme disease.

Yes, by all accounts it isn't nice... there are links between it and Fibromyalgia (symptoms can be similar, etc.) and like Fibro, I think it can be misunderstood / misdiagnosed and not taken seriously, which doesn't help when someone is suffering.

Hopefully your health is improving now; I wish you the best.
 
So did the government shove them full of Coxiella as well? *Rolls eyes*
 
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