When I was twelve years old, I found a bump on my ankle that was about the size of a nail head. It looked and felt like a scab. I didn’t think much of it until a few days later when I noticed that it had legs. I showed my brothers. They confirmed that it was a tick and we discussed what to do next. We were all in agreement that simply removing it might cause the head to break off in my bloodstream, which would then travel to my heart and kill me. The best course of action, the only course of action really, was to burn it off.
I lay on the bathroom floor, my older brother struck a match and said, “I’m going to burn the little bugger.” After several excruciating seconds, I shouted, “Stop! Stop! It’s digging in deeper!” In retrospect, I know that the tick was not burrowing deeper, but that my brother was burning the wrong little bugger. I convinced him to swap out the box of matches for a pair of tweezers and he proceeded to pull. The tick came out and my heart continued to beat, but I knew I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I had heard a story about a woman who was bitten by a tick and then confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. After a few days without any symptoms, I stopped worrying, forgot about it, and moved on.
However, for many Americans, the story doesn’t end with the tick being dislodged. My friend’s father is one of them. He has Lyme disease that he contracted from a tick bite in Connecticut, a state that is ground zero for the ailment. Shortly after my friend told me about the often debilitating effects her father suffers from, I stumbled across Bitten.
Science writer Kris Newby was bitten by a tick while vacationing on the East Coast. This led to years of illness and medical bills. It took ten doctors to diagnose her with Lyme disease, a classification that according to the government didn't exist, despite 300,000 Americans being afflicted with it each year.
At first, Newby attempted to understand why patients suffering from Lyme disease are often not treated or diagnosed. She encountered a tremendous amount of obfuscation by the medical community and government and began to ask why. That’s when she encountered Willy Burgdorfer.
Willy was a Swiss American entomologist who specialized in ticks. In the early 80’s he discovered that ticks were vectors for a spiral-shaped bacterium that caused Lyme disease. Burgdorfer worked at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a National Institute of Health facility in Montana. His decades-long career took place during the Cold War. Before he died in 2014 he confessed while being filmed for a documentary. Newby used this footage, as well as her interviews with Burgdorfer and others, along with meticulous research, and FOIA requests to the CIA and NIH, to piece together this story.
Newby detailed how in 1968 there was an outbreak of unusual illness in New England.
“Off the coast of Long Island, around Lyme, Connecticut, a cluster of people were suffering from a disease that caused joint inflammation and bull’s-eye rashes.”
She makes the detailed case that the proliferation of tick-borne diseases was the result of a military experiment gone wrong. Burgdorfer had been contracted by the US Government to develop bioweapons during the Cold War that likely led to the epidemic of tick-borne diseases that started in Connecticut and New York in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
Newby only presents supported conclusions and leaves a fair bit of room for nuance. She treats Willy Burgdorfer with respect and a kind of admiration; he is portrayed as a complex character. So much so that it’s hard not to like him by the end of the book. Before the documentary revelation, he wrote a sticky note on his research papers that Newby found.
“I wondered why somebody didn’t do something. Then I realized that I am somebody.” Picture of sticky note on one of Willy Burgdorfer’s folders from Kris Newby’s X, @KrisNewby.
This book also explains why patients in our healthcare system do not receive early treatment.
“With Lyme disease, there’s no profit incentive for proactively treating someone with a few weeks of inexpensive, off-patent antibiotics. It’s the patentable vaccines and mandatory tests-before-treatment that bring in the steady revenues year after year.”
Published in 2019, Bitten was written with a prescience that rings out clearly after the events of the last four years. The fact that Newby published before those events, lends her work credibility.
If you want to understand the origins of Lyme disease in an objective and entertaining manner then Bitten is a good resource. If you have less time, check out Newby’s posts, including her synopsis of Bitten, on her Substack,
.If you have less time and want to read a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later-piece, then try out this article from IM1776. Here is the opening paragraph.
“It was an infamous moment in the history of disease. People living near a secretive government bioweapons lab suddenly start getting sick. The government launches an investigation and declares that they’ve found a new disease. Independent journalists learn that the government was using the nearby lab to conduct gain-of-function experiments on animal-borne illnesses, and speculate that a lab leak might be the cause of the outbreak. The corporate media and expert class immediately spring into action and declare that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory. You may be thinking that this is a summary of the SARS‑CoV‑2 lab leak story from 2020. In fact, it describes the outbreak of Lyme disease in the 1970s.”
Couldn't you just see the metal shavings flying from the ax as you read it?
Whatever you encounter this week in your world, remember that you are someone who can do something about it.
Wow, I thought nothing would surprise me after COVID, but your article did. In the 70's I was doing some geological exploring in Eastern Washington for a GeoTech firm, and we were instructed to watch our for ticks as they cause lyme disease. Every day we did a full body exam looking for ticks. Little did I know our government may have been involved. Always like to be informed, thank you for the articles you send out.