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As a victim myself of so-called Lyme disease – and as a naturalist & journalist – I would like to broaden Tracy Frisch’s fine article ('Lyme that lingers' Hill Country Observer July, 2012).
It is too often overlooked that this disease is a pandemic which is rooted in biological warfare experiments – specifically entomological warfare which blossomed after WWII when “non-lethal weapons” came into vogue with the military’s objectives of crippling whole populations while keeping their valuable infrastructure intact. Some military minds considered it more benign and less wholesale when compared with the atomic bomb. Another “beauty” of this approach was it rendered the target population so sick with “protean symptoms” that it could not respond to an assault. Protean, named after Neptune’s shape-shifting son Proteus, is a new kind of disease with so many symptoms that it is “difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat” – two qualities that “Lyme” is famous for.
At the end of WWII German, Japanese, Chinese and U.S. scientists were all experimenting with airdropping infected fleas, ticks, and spiders on unwitting populations. U.S. military archives admit to using this approach over North Korea in 1951.
At the May 21, 2012 LymeNext conference at Skidmore College we learned that worldwide there are at least ten strains of borrelia (the first-identified “Lyme” bacterial infection) Further, any one infected tick may contain a soup of borrelia and as many ten other bacteria & viruses, some (like Brucellosis) with a military history. These create the pesky co-infections which may not respond to antibiotics and which can progress unchecked (difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat). While others continue to argue whether or not “Lyme” is chronic, many of us now call it progressive.
Many Lyme activists say yes, this pandemic may find its roots in military applications but this is not where our emphasis needs to be now. We must focus on relieving the suffering of those who are undiagnosed, misdiagnosed (or underdiagnosed regarding co-infections).
We must, of course, relieve this suffering.
We need also to close down the laboratories which have proliferated in our communities across the U.S. since 9/11 - under the guise of defending us when, in truth, they are further contaminating us with pathogens including those for which there is no known cure. These are called Bio-hazard Level IV. Germs Gone Wild, the 2010 book by Kenneth King, discusses this dangerous expansion. Many of your readers who are already aware of Plum Island may want to do their own investigation.
To that end I offer this list of other books to help your readers learn more about entomological warfare and other bio-engineered disease:
-Tomorrow’s Weapons - Nerve gases and germ warfare… the morality of toxic warfare and its implications for peace – Brig. Gen. J.H. Rothschild (1964)
-Biowarfare & Terrorism – Francis A. Boyle
-Osler’s Web - Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic – Hillary Johnson
-Clouds of Secrecy - The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas – Leonard A. Cole
-The Brucellosis Triangle - The Neuro-degenerative/Systemic-degenerative Diseases – Donald W. Scott & William L.C. Scott
-Lab 257 - The Disturbing Story of the Government Secret Plum Island Germ Lab – William C. Carroll
-The Extremely Unfortunate Skull Valley Incident – Donald W. Scott & William L.C. Scott.
The 2008 documentary film Under Our Skin, by Andy Abrahams Wilson, is still the best introduction to the politics of “Lyme”, exposing the incestuous relationships among the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, university research labs and the patenting of disease components.
Bonnie Hoag is an investigative journalist with a background in community radio and a long history of writing letters-to-the-editor when she can't find courageous media to publish her essays, articles, and research results.