No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say

[rangerrebew]

No, Lyme disease is not an escaped military bioweapon, despite what conspiracy theorists say


July 29, 2019 · 12:30 PM EDT
By Sam Telford

Could Lyme disease in the US be the result of an accidental release from a secret bioweapons experiment? Could the military have specifically engineered the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive — and then let it somehow escape the lab and spread in nature?

Is this why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with this potentially debilitating disease?

It’s an old conspiracy theory currently enjoying a resurgence with lots of sensational headlines and tweets. Even Congress has ordered that the Pentagon must reveal whether it weaponized ticks.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-07-29/no-lyme-disease-not-escaped-military-bioweapon-despite-what-conspiracy-theorists

[PeteS in CA]

I started working on Lyme disease in 1985. As part of my doctoral thesis, I investigated whether museum specimens of ticks and mice contained evidence of infection with the bacterial agent of Lyme disease prior to the first known American human cases in the mid-1970s.

Working with microbiologist David Persing, we found that ticks from the South Fork of Long Island collected in 1945 were infected. Subsequent studies found that mice from Cape Cod, collected in 1896, were infected.

So, decades before Lyme was identified — and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it — the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild. That alone is proof that the conspiracy theory is wrong. But there are plenty of other lines of evidence that show why Lyme disease did not require the human hand changing something Mother Nature had nurtured.

Unsurprisingly. Not knowing something exists is not proof the something didn't exist before being recognized.