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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 17 2019, @02:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the Tin-Foil-Hat dept.

Hot on the heels of "Savage Tick-Clone Armies are Sucking Cows to Death" comes an assertion that the US Pentagon is responsible for introducing Lyme-disease-carrying ticks into North America. According to a story in the Global Canadian newspaper "a bill has been passed in the House of Representatives which requires the Department of Defence to investigate whether research on biological weapons using insects took place in a 25-year period and whether these insects were released into the public realm either accidentally or on purpose."

The claim originated in the book 'Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons' by Kris Newby. The book tells the tale of "Willy Burgdorfer, the man who discovered the microbe behind Lyme Disease, revealing his secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons, and raising terrifying questions about the genesis of the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today."

In presenting the amendment in the House, New Jersey Republican Rep. Christopher H. Smith asked "With Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases exploding in the United States — with an estimated 300,000 to 437,000 new cases diagnosed each year and 10-20 percent of all patients suffering from chronic Lyme disease — Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true. And have these experiments caused Lyme disease and other tick-borne disease to mutate and to spread?"

Also at CBS News.

Related: Lyme Disease Lowers Quality of Life Significantly
Long-Underfunded Lyme Disease Research Gets an Injection of Money—and Ideas
New Approaches to Detecting Lyme Disease in Development


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 17 2019, @04:17PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday July 17 2019, @04:17PM (#868053) Journal

    (Important qualifying note: I'm NOT claiming the Pentagon was actual involved in spreading Lyme Disease, which sounds tenuous to me. But the article in TFA is factual in that a Congressional representative has accused the Pentagon of doing this.)

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:14PM (#868131)

    But the article in TFA is factual in that a Congressional representative has accused the Pentagon of doing this.

    These days that doesn't mean a thing. Republicans are routinely spewing nonsense and repeating ridiculous conspiracy theories they pick up directly from Fox News, as is the current occupant of the White House.

    Not that I object to investigating this: stranger things have happened and while I hope our military didn't do this to us, I'm under no illusions that they very well could have--just ask anyone living in cancer belt Southern Utah during the 50s and 60s, when the military made sure the fallout from their above-ground nuclear tests fell on them, rather than, say, the residents of Las Vegas, or central Nevada. But I wouldn't cite a congressperson's ramblings as anything other than that: ramblings.