Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Radio War Nerd EP #190 — Ticks, Lyme Disease & Cold War Biological Warfare Programs (Patreon)

Published:
2019-07-17 02:13:29
Edited:
2019-07-21 17:43:24
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

Content

Guest: Kris Newby, author, filmmaker, science journalist 

Recorded: July 12, 2019

Ames has been pestering the War Nerd community with his obsession over Lyme disease & ticks—and author Kris Newby, a Lyme survivor, has just the medicine to make Ames more miserable than ever: "Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons", a remarkable & blood-curdling book about ticks & some of the Cold War's darkest and craziest secret programs.

At 1:28:00 the War Nerd & Ames discuss the UAE's withdrawal in military defeat from Yemen . . .  and the latest moves in the Iran-US-UK "tanker war" shuffle . . . 

Image: force-feeding clay-embedded ticks with disease agents (ie potential biological weapons). via krisnewby.com 

Buy Kris Newby's book "Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons". Watch Kris's documentary film Under Our Skin.  Read Kris's science writing at Stanford Medical School's Scope.

Intermission music by RWN sound god Brendon Anderegg. Buy Brendon's music at Thrill Jockey.

And don't forget the new audiobook by the War Nerd's alter-ego John Dolan: "Pleasant Hell", the comic memoir read by the author himself. Buy it here! 

Total time: 1:54:34

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

Timothy DuPont

One of the nice things about living in Alaska is there aren’t a lot of ticks or infectious insects and yet I recently spoke to a friend at the Department of Fish and Game who said there are some new concerns with ticks making their way north...

Bruno Latour

This story is for Mark: why ticks aren't quite so scary, or at least sort of less disgusting, once you've had extensive contact with them .... My family and I lived in Tripoli, Libya in the 80s, having moved from Bulgaria so that my parents could work there as expats (basically providing Libya's workforce). At first, we lived in an apartment arranged for Bulgarian expats, which meant sharing 2 bedrooms with another family. But my dad was lucky enough to find a job with a German company, Siemens, and soon enough they set us up with a house all to ourselves. Anyways, when we moved into this house, we learned that we were taking it over from an American man (who lived there alone); this was odd, since Quadafi had already kicked out most Americans. In any case, he basically left in a hurry for some reason, leaving almost everything in the house, including the furniture ... and a dog. This dog was a lovely old golden shepherd/retriever. Unfortunately, it was at death's door: it was emaciated and ... infested with ticks. And I mean, infested, as in: it was covered with 100s of them. Thinking back on it, I can't understand how this man could've allowed this to happen to this poor creature; it requires almost deliberate neglect or cruelty to allow a dog to become so totally infested. .... So, we took it to a vet, and they said it would likely die, but we could try taking off the ticks with a chemical solution of some kind (this foul-smelling white stuff). Unfortunately, the solution was not strong enough to dislodge the ticks by itself. So ... we had to do it manually. So ... there I am, about 9 or 10 years old, wearing latex gloves, and pulling off these massive, blood-engorged ticks from the body of this poor dog. It took literally hours and hours. And there was a special method we had to try and use when pulling them off, like a twisting motion, so as not to leave their legs or whatever stuck in the skin. It was vomit-inducing at first, but after a few minutes you got used to it ... and it felt good to be saving this dog. The life of which, I'm happy to say, we did indeed save, and she became our pet for the next 5 or 6 years till she died of old age! Bonus: she never got another tick for the rest of her life with us. The house immediately adjacent to ours was occupied by a family of Syrians, where the father was a UN diplomat. We later became close friends and, at some point, he told us - in hush-hush terms - that the American man who lived in our house before was, as far as people he worked with knew, some sort of CIA spook working under cover at Libya's UN mission. .... Perhaps the dog was part of the cover, hence the abysmal treatment.

Thomas

get mark on chapo

Timothy DuPont

Chapo refers to the podcast “Chapo Trap House” of which John was recently on. Interesting story though Attila, I could see how removing the ticks would be satisfying in that odd sort of way.

Ellen Harold

I used to be responsible for removing the ticks, hundred of them, on a weekly basis during tick season (May & June), when I was nine years old, because it was my dog, my parents said. It was the same nasty process described above. Those were brown dog ticks. Much larger & easier to see and not vectors of horrid human diseases like the minuscule deer or black- leg ticks we have now.

mt

This is just sick (no place for pun). Are these people really trying to see if there is a circle under the last circle in hell?

Gerhard Stoltz

Definitely one of those "i'll just go hide in the basement and never come outside again ever"-kind of episodes. Another book that is worthwhile in the genre is Jonathan Moreno's "Undue Risk". Very recommended (if you like these kinds of horror stories that is.....)

Scorched Earth

This reminds of a radio show I heard a few years ago on CIUT where the guest was saying that HIV/AIDS was a US army experiment that escaped into the wild; perhaps deliberately. The army researchers recruited 1000 guy men for the experiment, stipulating that they must be gay only. I don’t know how factual this is, but considering the US military’s sordid history regarding these kinds of things, I’m inclined to give the story credence.

Chuck Petras

Years ago I worked with a guy who said when he was attending university (UCLA, late 70s), he said that he use to cut through the UCLA Medical Center on his way to classes. One day he got really sick and was laid up for quite a few months. The symptoms he described were not unlike what Kris described. He thought he got infected by something airborne while walking through the hospital campus.

Chuck Petras

"If you have an over-abundance of ticks in your vicinity, or live in a "hot-spot" area for diseases like Lyme, Anaplasmosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Bovine's Revenge, tick tubes can be an extremely effective tool to disrupt the life-cycle of the tick and bringing your area of nature back into balance." http://www.practicalprimitive.com/skillofthemonth/ticktubes

Avery

Just last week, a Japanese historian uncovered a manuscript detailing the exact numbers of chemical weapons used on the Chinese. The original was of course burned in 1945 but a handwritten copy had survived in someone's private library. I wonder if any British colonialists were so conscientious.

Mark Ames

Amazing story, I wish I could hear more about it. Sounds about right too. Used to have a panicky fear of flying, until I flew dozens of times of pop-up Russian regional airline Tupelevs and Yaks during the 90s when no one was checking anything, -- I once bribed a pilot in mid-air into landing in Voronezh where I needed to land, even though the pilots couldn't see the airport because the fog was too low and were advised to turn back -- once you've done that enough times, you get pretty inured to it. Still, I'd rather be in a Yak than be hosting a tick.

Some Guy

FYI, regardless of there being bioweapons programs that attempted to weaponize ticks or Lyme disease (which is completely plausible and likely), the genetics of isolated Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete bacteria suggest that the infectious strains being observed are at least 60,000 years old and that it is primarily the ecological changes of the last century in North America that is causing the population of the disease-causing bacterium and its tick vectors to explode and humans to come into contact with it more. I ran across the following paper a few months ago during my day job as an evolutionary biologist. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6431794/ The bacteria in circulation are far too genetically diverse to have come from one or a few instances of bioweapons tampering. They have probably been circulating in the forests at low density for tens of thousands of years accumulating divergent genetics, and then recently erupted into large bacterial populations that humans come into contact with frequently in a way that preserves all that ancient diversity rather than particular special strains expanding. The simultaneous explosion of multiple tick borne disease would make sense if the forest ecology got out of whack around then such that the vector populations exploded and more ticks were infected and more virulent mutations that can appear all the time fail to burn out. And it happened first in New England, where this civilization has been messing with the forests the longest...

Joseph Yachimec

To add to the literary corner, Barthelme's "Report" was beeping loudly in the back of my head for the whole episode. "We could, of course, release thousands upon thousands of self-powered crawling-along-the-ground. lengths of titanium wire eighteen inches long with a diameter of .0005 centimeters (that is to say, invisible) which, scenting an enemy, climb up his trouser leg and wrap themselves around his neck. We have developed those. They are within our capabilities. We could, of course, release in the arena of the upper air our new improved pufferfish toxin which precipitates an identity crisis. No special technical problems there. That is almost laughably easy. We could, of course, place up to two million maggots in their rice within twenty-four hours. The maggots are ready, massed in secret staging areas in Alabama. We have hypodermic darts capable of piebalding the enemy's pigmentation. We have rots, blights, and rusts capable of attacking his alphabet. Those are dandies. We have a hut-shrinking chemical which penetrates the fibers of the bamboo, causing it, the hut, to strangle its occupants. This operates only after 10 P.M., when people are sleeping. Their mathematics are at the mercy of a suppurating surd we have invented. We have a family of fishes trained to attack their fishes. We have the deadly testicle-destroying telegram. The cable companies are cooperating. We have a green substance that—well, I'd rather not talk about. We have a secret word that, if pronounced, produces multiple fractures in all living things in an area the size of four football fields." (1967) I know this is getting into delicate territory, but I'd love to see an MKULTRA episode from you guys. And not to stoke your anxiety Mark, but have you ever read Plagues and Peoples by William Hardy McNeill? It's from the seventies so I can't vouch for the currency of the research (and haven't read any of his other stuff), but using a microbe lens to look at human history is a cool way to go about things.

carlquist harris

The UAE debacle in Yemen reminds me of the 1940 Italian invasion of Greece. I can't remember your ever doing an episode on that one.

Larry Dimes

This is kind of a tangent, but given the love that this program has for science fiction and the H.P. Lovecraft references in this episode, I’m going to have to suggest the short story A Colder War by Charles Stross. It’s the best fusion of cosmic horror and the Cold War I’ve seen. Here is the full text if anyone is interested. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Bruno Latour

Thanks for your note Mark! .... Although I must confess, I decided to Google "tick infested dog" for images, just to recall what it looked like ... and my stomach is no longer as strong as it likely was back in my tweens, lol! I'm not sure I'd be able to do it again. As for stories from Libya, I have dozens. For example, we were there in '86 during the bombing, etc. It was an interesting (to say the least) place to grow up; also, wonderful in many ways ... despite a lot of crazy stuff, I have very fond memories of it all. Cheers!

Oskaras Funk

"coalition of the floating"? C'mon Mark, "coalition of the sinking" was sitting right there in front of you

Mark Ames

Yep. Choked. Dropped a perfectly laid quip, Cliff Branch-style.

Guys_Frenchy’s_Official

Thanks for this post, I would like to hear Newby address this. Generally, I've heard/read BOTH that Lyme disease emerged in the late 70s in CT, and that Lyme disease (or the base spirochetes) have been around for thousands of years.

Guys_Frenchy’s_Official

Just listened to the first half an hour of this episode and am looking forward to the rest. I live in southern New England and was diagnosed with Lyme right around when Newby was. However, I'm that rare and lucky dude: I took the antibiotics and seemed to have been cured (ie, haven't had any symptoms in the last almost 20 years). At the time, the antibiotic course was 3 months of Doxy. However, I've had a morbid fascination with Lyme disease since that time and have read a fair amount about it. I grew up in northern New England, and ticks simply didn't exist up there when I was a kid because it was too cold. With climate change, deer ticks are all over the place and it's had a tremendous impact on our relationship to the outdoors.

Guys_Frenchy’s_Official

I want to throw out a couple tidbits related to Lyme and the episode. 1) Tony B's point above deserves an answer: many people claim that Lyme disease has been around (essentially) for thousands of years. What does Newby say about that? 2) Mark, while you can get Lyme from a tiny nymph tick, that tick will already need to have taken one blood meal on a Lyme-infected host, in order for you to get infected. The tick doesn't carry Lyme at birth; it needs to pick it up from its host (deer, etc.). This was what an entomologist told me, anyway. 3) Things are much better since Newby's (and my) time getting Lyme disease in one sense at least: much fewer doctors will give you a hassle about antibiotics. (For sufferers of chronic Lyme, it's a different story: many of these people say they need to be on antibiotics constantly (often IV antibiotics) in order to feel better, and doctors rarely go along with this. I'm kind of with the doctors on this one; at least, it's a complicated situation.) Getting that first antibiotic dose is really, really important if you've been bitten by a tick. And the risk of Lyme is way too serious to NOT to take antibiotics. Antibiotics are widely available without a prescription if you know where to look and people in tick heavy areas should probably keep them on hand. Anyone curious about this topic can email me at rwilliams51 at riseup dot net. 4) If anyone finds an attached deer tick, for God's sake, KEEP THE TICK. Send it in to www.tickreport.com, a laboratory run by the UMass Amherst Dept. of Medical Zoology. For $50, they will run tests on the tick (and enter it into their database). I found a deer tick on my belly the year before last, and let me tell you, it is SO MUCH better to have the tick tested by a lab to find out whether you have Lyme disease, etc., rather than waiting around for the symptoms to emerge, asking yourself, 'Do I feel a little achey today? Am I running a fever?' Especially if you're a total hypochondriac like myself. (The little fucker on my belly turned out to be negative.) 5) No question, the Lyme support community has some questionable characters. There are probably outright quacks and scam artists, but I'm talking about perfectly well-meaning people who have had their judgment (for lack of a better word) affected by their experience with this horrible disease. For ex., I went to see an acupuncturist about ten or so years ago when I had a stiff neck. She was a very nice woman, but she took the questionnaire that I'd filled out beforehand and told me I had a lot of symptoms of chronic Lyme. One question was, have you ever had migraines? I had--twice in 40 some odd years. Suffered from depression? Sure, who hasn't? I'm an American and a communist, for God's sake. Ever feel tired in the morning? Etc., etc. It turned out this very nice woman, a preppy athletic type, had gotten very ill in her youth and it turned out to be undiagnosed Lyme disease. She had traveled the world looking for a cure and had discovered acupuncture, and now she provides great comfort to the community of sufferers of chronic Lyme who haven't been treated well by conventional Western medicine. All of this is fine and good, but she really tried to draw me into this community pretty aggressively, and I could see that a more weak-willed person might have gone along with it. (I stopped the acupuncture after a few sessions, concluding that it cost about the same $ as a massage, didn't feel good, and involved me getting lacerated with a bunch of needles.) Anyway, sorry to write so much on your page here but I really enjoyed the episode (clearly I found it very provocative...) and I have to say that if the conspiracy theory turned out to true and Lyme disease was engineered by the military on Plum Island, the people of New England would be seriously pissed and their righteous anger would make Cthulhu look like a Golden retriever puppy.

Joshua Scholar

I'm tempted to listen to this, but I'm not looking forward to it. Lyme disease is just a bacteria that's hard to treat because it has such a slow life cycle, and it's only vulnerable to antibiotics in a small portion of it (probably when dividing). So, for instance, taking penicillin for months will get rid of it. A bacteria, susceptible to the oldest antibiotic known, that sure doesn't sound like a bioweapon to me.

Lojban Chauvinist

Finally got around to listening to this one. I was scared to listen back when I first started ploughing through the RWN archives 3 years ago -- but not for the right reasons. I thought it would be unsubstantiated conspiracy theorizing. I was totally wrong. Newby is an excellent guest, and this is one of the most seriously terrifying episodes among a litany of horrors-of-war covered on the show

Sammy

Hi guys. I have listened to this as has my brother, who has serious long term disease from the sequelae of Lyme. He wanted me to pass on this, which he also tried to email and send on Twitter: an episode of his podcast which covers some of the same material of Newbys book and cold War bioweapons but also covers territory that would be novel about how similar non Lyme viral outbreaks in the 80s caused "CFS" and were never investigated fully and how environmental pollutants/toxins may tie into all of that. I know this is a total total long shot to try to get in touch here but I hope you will listen to the podcast and maybe share ...it also has some personal and autobiographical stuff https://soundcloud.com/headlessyouthpodcast/tribulations-25-ft-allegedlyzo