Three More Eponymous Diseases: Arthropod Bites

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
A little more than a year ago, we did an
episode on eponymous diseases, which I kind of thought might
only be interesting to me, but we got some emails
from folks in the audience who seem to really like it,
so we are doing another one.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Last time, we talked.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
About three diseases that were all named for the place
where a notable outbreak happened, which led to their being
identified and named, and today's really similar. These are named
after places again, but this time these are all diseases
that you get after being bitten by something specifically mosquitoes

(00:54):
and tics, and since both of those feed on blood,
this also feels just a little bit like a precursor
to October episodes. The diseases that we are going to
talk about our West Nile virus, lime disease, and Rocky
Mountain spotted fever. I was originally going to put them
in chronological order, but the Rocky Mountain spotted fever story

(01:19):
turned out to have a couple of twists in it.
That made it feel like putting anything after that would
seem a little anti climactic. Also, just to note, there
is various animal experimentation in this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
So first we have West Nile virus. West Nile virus
is part of a large family of viruses, many of
which cause disease in humans, including dengey fever, zica, and
Japanese encephalitis, and the story of how it was discovered
and named is pretty straightforward, although it happened during research
into a different disease, that being yellow fever. This research

(01:57):
was conducted through the Yellow Fever Institute, which was established
by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Division in nineteen thirty six.
By the late nineteen thirties, researchers had isolated the virus
that causes yellow fever, and they had determined that there
were multiple strains of it circulating in parts of Africa

(02:17):
and South America, and they also knew that people who
recovered from yellow fever were typically immune to it afterward,
and in a large region of Central and western Africa,
a lot of people had this post infection immunity. The
Institute was conducting research along the edges of this endemic zone,

(02:38):
where people were less likely to already have immunity, so
they could try to isolate and study different strains of
the yellow fever virus. In December of nineteen thirty seven,
a physician from the institute named A. W. Burke saw
a woman from the West Nile district of Northern Uganda.
She had a fever of one hundred point six degrees

(02:59):
fahrenheit that's about thirty eight point one degree celsius, but
she said she wasn't having any other symptoms. Her blood
was drawn and three months later she returned to have
another blood draw and at this follow up she said
she hadn't had any other signs of illness around the
time of her prior visit. Researchers isolated a different virus

(03:21):
from the blood they drew at her first visit, and
she had antibodies to that virus at her follow up
three months later. Yeah, so they were looking for yellow fever,
but this was something else. The researchers did a bunch
of experiments with this virus that involved inoculating mice with it.
They ultimately found that it was lethal one hundred percent

(03:41):
of the time when a mouse's brain was exposed to it,
but it was a lot less lethal in exposure through
the skin. They also did research on other animals. Rhesei's
monkeys developed encephalitis when they were exposed through their brains
or their noses, but they had milder illness when they
were given a subcutaneous inoculation. Other monkeys had only a

(04:06):
mild illness no matter how they were exposed to the virus,
and rabbits didn't develop any signs of illness at all.
This was similar to research that was being conducted with
the various strains of yellow fever virus that the institute
had isolated from other patients. The team published their research
on this newly isolated virus in the American Journal of

(04:27):
Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in nineteen forty. In their paper,
they named it the West Nile virus, after the district
of Uganda where they encountered this patient.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
So at this point, it really doesn't seem like this
virus was causing a lot of illness in humans. If
it was, it wasn't causing illnesses that really stood out.
It's not completely clear whether it made that first patient
feel sick. The paper's authors speculated that she might have
said she wasn't having any symptoms because she did didn't

(05:00):
want to be hospitalized, which in my opinion is pretty reasonable,
and they also stated that quote she was not altogether cooperative,
and it is possible that she withheld pertinent facts. It
is reasonable to have some skepticism about this characterization of her,
but it is also possible that she might have had
symptoms that she chose not to tell the doctors about.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
More than a decade passed between the identification of the
virus and the next time it was isolated in patients.
This involved three apparently healthy children in Egypt, and it
wasn't until the nineteen fifties and sixties that there were
large enough outbreaks for researchers to really study the virus
in human patients rather than in lab animals. Most of

(05:45):
these outbreaks were in places around the Mediterranean. Symptoms included fever, headache,
muscle pain, rashes, abdominal pain, and vomiting. Smaller numbers of
patients had swollen lymph nodes, chest pain, and diarrhea.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Research in the Upper Nile Delta in nineteen fifty one
started looking for signs of West Nile in non human
animals in the wild, as well as evidence of whether
it could be transmitted by insects. The virus was found
to be capable of infecting a wide range of animals,
and it seemed to be particularly fatal in horses and

(06:22):
other equines. The virus was first identified in birds in
nineteen fifty three, and today birds are considered to be
the virus's primary host. The research also found that West
Nile could be isolated from mosquitoes, but not from some
other insects, and today we know that it is transmitted
mostly through mosquito bites.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Until the late nineteen fifties, cases of West Nile were
usually relatively mild and self limiting. In some places, the
majority of children had evidence of being infected at some point,
and it seemed almost like a routine childhood illness. Research
that first identified the virus had suggested that it could
cause encephalitis, and it's related to other viruses that do,

(07:07):
but that wasn't really happening in human patients.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
That started to change in nineteen fifty seven, when an
outbreak in Israel affected several elderly people, and many of
them developed severe neurological symptoms. After this outbreak, it became
more common for people with West Nile virus to develop encephalitis, meningitis,
or some other kind of serious neurological issue, and to

(07:34):
die from the disease.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
There was another shift in nineteen ninety six with an
outbreak in Bucharest, Romania, which was the first major outbreak
in a primarily urban area. Most people in Bucharest did
not have air conditioning, so they kept the windows open,
and many of those windows did not have screens. Another
factor was that many people were living in apartment buildings

(07:58):
that had flooded basements, and of course that created a
breeding ground for mosquitoes. A lot of patients in this
outbreak had some kind of involvement of their central nervous system.
This was also the first outbreak in which one particular mosquito,
the common house mosquito or qlex pipions, became recognized as

(08:18):
a vector.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
After this outbreak in Romania, outbreaks of West Nile virus
disease started happening in more places far away from Equatorial
Africa and the Mediterranean, with a greater proportion of the
patients having more severe symptoms. For example, an outbreak in
Russia in nineteen ninety nine had one hundred and eighty

(08:40):
three confirmed cases, with more than half of those people
developing acute meningo encephalitis, and there were forty deaths. More
than seventy five percent of the deaths were in people
sixty years old and older.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
That same year, West Nile virus was reported in North
America for the first time. This was in New York City,
and it was initially suspected to be Saint Louis encephalitis
that is also related to West Nile virus. The strain
of West Nile virus that was isolated in this outbreak
was similar to one that was circulating in and around

(09:15):
Israel at the time. It is not definitively known exactly
how the virus arrived in New York, but two possibilities
are mosquitoes that found their way onto international flights and
illegally imported birds. It was not spread by sick humans.
While humans can get West Nile virus, it doesn't reach

(09:36):
a high enough level in our blood to infect a mosquito,
and it doesn't spread from person to person except very
rarely through things like blood transfusion and organ donation.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Within three years of its arrival in New York, West
now virus had been detected in forty four states and
the district of Columbia, and it has since spread to
Mexico and Central and South America. A subtype of West
Nole virus called Kungen virus was first isolated in Australia
in nineteen sixty, but it was not classified as a

(10:10):
strain of West Nile until a lot later.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Today, most people who contract West Nile virus have minor
symptoms or even no symptoms at all, but about one
percent of patients develop West Nile virus neuroinvasive disease, which
is a severe and serious illness that can involve meningitis, encephalitis,
or acute flaccid paralysis, and it can be deadly. There

(10:35):
is no treatment for the virus itself, only for some
of the symptoms and issues that it can cause.

Speaker 2 (10:41):
There are some veterinary vaccines for West Nile virus, including
one for horses, but there's not a human vaccine yet.
Part of that has to do with the virus itself
and how it mutates, but it's also connected to the
fact that West Nile virus outbreaks in humans can be
kind of random in their size and severity and location. Ideally,

(11:04):
if someone was doing efficacy testing for a vaccine, they
would be able to administer it to a population before
an outbreak actually started, so they could see whether that
population was protected. But the unpredictability and seasonality of major
outbreaks makes that hard to do with this specific illness,
so prevention is largely based on avoiding mosquito bites and

(11:29):
on mosquito control and health authorities taking screening steps for
blood and organ donation when there is an outbreak. We
have more fun disease talk coming up, but first we're
going to pause for a sponsor break. In May of

(11:52):
twenty fourteen, research was published in the journal Historical Biology
that described fossilized tics preserved in Dominican amber that had
spirrokeat like cells in their digestive tracks. The size and
shape of these cells strongly resembled bacteria from today's Brellia species.
Burrellia borgdorferi is one of the bacteria that caused lime disease, and,

(12:17):
according to research published in the journal Nature Ecology and
Evolution in twenty seventeen, its family tree is at least
sixty thousand years old. Research on the fifty three hundred
year old mummy known as Utsy the Iceman who has
made many appearances on our show and on installments of Unearthed,

(12:38):
also found DNA evidence of Borellia bacteria in his bone marrow.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Written descriptions of symptoms that are associated with lime disease
started in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
eighteen eighty three, German physician Alfred Buchwald described a chronic
skin condition typically affecting the hands and feet, that sounds
like something that can happen in a late stage untreated
lime disease. Almost forty years later, Swedish dermatologist Arvidovzelius described

(13:09):
a rash that frequently occurs in lime disease, which can
be shaped like a bullseye. In the nineteen twenties, two
doctors in France, Ce Garrin and A Bougeadou described a
patient who developed a rash in neurological symptoms after a
tick bite, which is sometimes described as the first clinical
description of lime disease, but the patient also had other

(13:31):
symptoms that were not consistent with lime.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
But the name lime disease today also known as lime boreliosis,
is way newer than any of that It is only
fifty years old. In nineteen seventy five, Polly Murray and
Judith Mensch, who lived in Lime, Connecticut, each contacted the
State Department of Health in Hartford, Connecticut. Polly Murray's husband

(13:56):
and two of her children were having recurring issues with
raw rush's headaches, muscle pain, and swollen joints. Judith Minch's
daughter had been diagnosed with osteomyelitis after experiencing severe knee swelling,
and then that diagnosis was changed to rheumatoid arthritis after
it didn't resolve with antibiotics. In addition to what was

(14:19):
going on in both of these women's families, they knew
about and had heard about other people, including other children
in their neighborhoods, who had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis
or with a similar condition. That was enough that it
seemed unusual and concerning, and both women wanted answers. Murray
and Minsch were not the only people to notice a

(14:41):
cluster of this kind of disease. There were also reports
from Cape Cod in the nineteen sixties, and researchers on
Long Island in New York were studying what was locally
called Montak knee. But Murray and Mensch's advocacy led to
a surveillance study in the communities of Old Lime, Lime
and East Hadda, Connecticut, which ultimately led to the disease

(15:02):
being identified and named. These three communities had a combined
population of about twelve thousand people, and researchers found thirty
nine children and twelve adults who had symptoms that were
similar to rheumatoid arthritis. But that was an unusually large
percentage of the population to have RA, especially when it

(15:25):
came to juvenile RA. But beyond that, the cases were
not spread out evenly among these three communities. They were
very heavily concentrated in specific areas. A lot of them
were in people who lived in wooded areas along the
same few roads. On some roads, as many as ten

(15:45):
percent of the children were affected. The state Department of
Public Health and Yale University worked together to try to
work out what was going on, including running blood work
and getting family medical histories from the people who were affected.
It seemed like most people's symptoms started in the late
summer or early fall. About a quarter of the patients

(16:07):
remembered having a rash that was shaped like a bullseye.
There rheumatoid arthritis like symptoms also seemed similar to a
collection of symptoms that were being reported in Europe. Soon,
a hypothesis emerged that this might be an illness that
followed some kind of bite. In August of nineteen seventy six,

(16:28):
Connecticut Commissioner of Public Health Douglas S. Lloyd issued a
circular to the States Directors of Health that set, in
part quote the seasonal and geographic distribution of cases and
the association with a skin lesion suggests that a virus
carried by a biting insect may be responsible for this disease.

(16:48):
By that point, researchers were calling the disease lime arthritis,
and they had pointed to the bulls eye rash, which
is known as eurhythmia migrants, or EM, as a leading symptom.
Over the next few years, other cases were documented elsewhere
in the United States. Most of these cases were still
clustered together in the northeastern US, in Wisconsin and in California, Oregon.

(17:14):
By nineteen seventy eight, the search for the diseases vector
was focused not on insects but on arachnids, specifically ticks,
among other things. Researchers in Connecticut started noticing that this
disease seemed to be more prevalent in areas that had
more tics.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
Swiss American medical entomologist Wilhelm Bergdorfer, known as Willie, worked
out of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, which had been established to
study Rocky Mountain spotted fever and later became part of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He and
his team were studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever on Long Island.

(17:53):
Ticks can carry.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Multiple diseases, and people who regularly encounterticks can wind up
with more than one, so this research on Rocky Mountain
spotted fever was overlapping with research into other tickborn pathogens,
and some of the patients had em This research involved
collecting large numbers of tics and studying the microorganisms that

(18:17):
were in their bodies. One of the microorganisms that they
found was a spirikeat. After finding this spira keet in
the bodies of ticks, researchers also spotted it in the
blood of patients with lime disease. In nineteen eighty two,
the spira keat was named Borellia Burgdorferi in honor of
Willie Bergdorfer, so it is epotymous both for Lime Connecticut

(18:40):
and for him today. Lime disease is found primarily in
North America, Europe, and Asia, and there are multiple species
of Burrellia bacteria that can cause it. Different species are
prevalent in different parts of the world. It's most often
spread by tics in the genus Exodes, with the exact
tick again ring from one region to another. In eastern

(19:03):
North America is usually the black legged tick, also called
the deer tick or Exodies scapularis. Whether these ticks actually
transmit lime disease varies from place to place, depending on
what animals the ticks are feeding on and whether those
animals carry the bacteria. For example, in the northeastern United States,

(19:25):
the ticks usually feed on rodents in their larval and
nymphal stages, and those rodents often carry the bacteria, but
in the Southwest, ticks at those stages of their lives
are often feeding on lizards, which do not.

Speaker 1 (19:41):
In North America, lime disease is also associated with deer,
but deer don't contract the disease and they don't pass
it on to ticks. Instead, deer are a primary food
source for adult tics, with those adults producing the next
generation of ticks, which start that psycolope again by picking
up Brillia bacteria from infected rodents when they feed as

(20:05):
larvae and nymphs.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Researchers believe this connection to deer is why lime disease
really started to become an issue in the mid twentieth
century in North America, and that traces back to the
ecological history of the continent. There's evidence that Borellia bacteria
existed in North America prior to the arrival of European colonists,

(20:27):
and so did rodents and deer and humans, all the
ingredients that are needed for lime disease transmission. But it
is also likely that there were a lot fewer deer
in North America then than there are today, since there
were earlier on a lot more large predators like wolves,
and more people hunting deer for food and other resources.

(20:51):
Indigenous land stewardship practices like controlled burns may have also
helped reduce the population of ticks. Then, as Europeans started
colonizing the Americas, deer were driven nearly to extinction through
overhunting and habitat loss. At the start of the twentieth century,
there were as few as three hundred thousand white tailed

(21:12):
deer across all of North America. Because of a combination
of conservation laws, changes in land use, and changes in
hunting patterns, the population of deer rebounded dramatically over the
first half of the twentieth century, and it's estimated that
they are between thirty and thirty five million white tailed
deer in North America today. Warmer winters due to climate

(21:36):
change also mean that fewer ticks are dying over the winter,
so it's likely that a person living in suburban New
England is living in proximity to more deer and more
deer ticks than people in the same region were prior
to colonization. In the nineteen nineties, a vaccine for lyme
disease was introduced in the United States, but it was

(21:57):
withdrawn from the market in two thousand and two. This
vaccine required a dose roughly every other year, and while
it definitely reduced a person's risk for developing lime disease,
it was reported to be about seventy five percent effective.
There were, of course, people who wanted that number to
be higher. There were also some concerns about whether the

(22:19):
vaccine could trigger autoimmune arthritis, although an investigation into those
concerns could not confirm any kind of connection. Lime disease
was also a lot less prevalent in two thousand and
two than it is today, so there just was not
as much demand for a vaccine, especially one that people
felt like didn't give them complete protection like it definitely,

(22:43):
as we said, reduced the risk of the disease, but
there were people for as sort of consumers wanted it
to be one hundred percent. However, there is a new
vaccine that is now in phase three clinical trials, with
the results of those trials expected by the end of
this year. That means prevention for lime disease is all

(23:05):
about avoiding tick bites. It's believed to take at least
twenty four hours of attachment for a tick to transmit
the spirakeat to a person, so people who spend time
outdoors are advised to thoroughly check themselves for ticks and
immediately remove them. People are also advised to seek medical
attention if they are bitten by a tick, regardless of

(23:26):
whether they develop that bullseye rash or develop other symptoms.
The rash develops in most cases but not all of them,
and it is also a lot harder to see on
people that have darker skin. Lime disease is treated with antibiotics,
most often doxycycline. Okay, my primary care doctor's my chart

(23:48):
landing page has a big thing that's like, have you
been bitten by a tick? Press this button. A couple
of quick notes before we take a break. There is
a conspiracy theory that lieme disease escaped from a research facility,
but as we have discussed, there is a lot of
established evidence that the bacteria that caused lime disease existed

(24:09):
in multiple parts of the world for decades or centuries
before that could have happened. In addition to what we've
already talked about, the bacteria have also been found in
nineteenth and early twentieth century rodents and tics in museum
collections in North America, which I find a fascinating way

(24:29):
to look at that.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Let's go back to the tax that.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
Are made animals and the preserved tics and see what
they've gotten their bodies. Also, there are people who continue
to have symptoms related to lime disease after going through treatment,
including cognitive issues, fatigue, and body aches. For a long
time people called this chronic lime, but the current recommended
terminology within the medical field is post treatment lime disease syndrome.

(24:56):
Because people experiencing these symptoms don't have signs the actual
pathogens still in their bodies. There's been a ton of
discussion and controversy around these symptoms and the terminology around
it for years. It's been called the liemars. That is
how contentious it is. This is way beyond what we
can really sort through as lay people on a history podcast.

(25:18):
But a lot of it has been rooted in the
fact that people still have symptoms, but that doctors can't
find evidence of what could be causing those symptoms. However,
since the COVID nineteen pandemic, in the existence of long COVID,
it does seem like there has been more awareness of
potential long term symptoms following and infection. We will talk

(25:40):
about Rocky Mountain spotted Fever after we have another sponsor
break the first reports of the illness that became known
as Rocky Mountain spotted fever. We're in bitter Root, Montana

(26:01):
in eighteen seventy three. At the time, most of the
people living in this region were either white settlers or
indigenous people, including the Bitter Root Salish, whose settlers called
the Flathead, although head flattening is not a Salish practice.
Symptoms of this illness included a fever and a rash,

(26:22):
as well as joint pain, nausea, and vomiting, and it
was very frequently fatal. People started calling this new disease
black measles, and since it seemed to strike in the
spring and summer, people thought it might be caused by
drinking melt water runoff from the mountains.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
There were tensions and violence between the white newcomers and
the Salish during this period, and the Salish would eventually
be forcibly removed to the Flathead Indian Reservation, which is
also home to the Upper Pendorat and the Coutiny. But
white people also recognized that the indigenous peoples of the
area might have some knowledge of this disease, so early

(27:03):
researchers asked indigenous people as well as white trappers, traders,
and missionaries who had had lots of interactions with them,
and based on these conversations, it seemed like this illness
was something new.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Over the eighteen eighties and nineties, cases were also reported
in the Quinn River Valley in Nevada and in other
parts of Montana. In eighteen ninety nine, physician Edward E.
Maxey of Boise, Idaho wrote what is regarded as the
first clinical description of the disease in a paper titled
Some Observations on the so called spotted Fever of Idaho

(27:40):
quote a feberal disease characterized clinically by a continuous, moderately
high fever and a profuse or pupyhic eruption in the skin,
appearing first on ankles, wrists, and forehead, but rapidly spreading
to all parts of body. By the early nineteen nineties,
the disease had also been reported in Washington, California, Arizona,

(28:03):
and New Mexico.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
The prevalence and seriousness of this disease was an influence
on the creation of the Montana State Board of Health
in nineteen oh one, two years after Montana attained statehood.
Understanding and trying to prevent or treat this disease was
one of the Board's biggest priorities from its inception. On
July first, nineteen oh two, the Board issued a paper

(28:27):
authored by W. M. Chowning and LB. Wilson that suggested
ground squirrels as a possible host for the disease and
tics as a potential vector. The disease appeared and disappeared
along with when ticks were most active, and a lot
of patients had a tick bite in their history.

Speaker 2 (28:45):
The following year, bacteriologist John F. Anderson studied the epidemiological
data that was available and confirmed that most documented cases
of this disease were in people who had a tick
bite before the star of their symptoms. His paper was
also the first written use of the name Rocky Mountain
spotted fever. A lot of the places where the disease

(29:08):
was being reported were in and around the Rocky Mountains.
In nineteen oh six, pathologist Howard Ricketts found infected wood
ticks in the Bitter Root Valley and showed that their
bites could sicken guinea pigs. In nineteen oh eight, the
Rocky Mountain wood tick was named dermaicentor andersonai after John F. Anderson,

(29:29):
and in nineteen oh nine, a bacterium that Ricketts isolated
from crushed tick bodies, which causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever,
was named Ricketzia Ricketsie after him. Like lime disease and
West malvirus. Rocky Mountain spotted fever was happening mostly seasonally
when the ticks were feeding, so the research into it

(29:52):
was really focused on the summer months.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
As the summer of.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Nineteen ten approached, Howard Ricketts was not sure if he
was going to get funding that summer, so he went
to Mexico City to work on an epidemic typhus outbreak.
Typhus is another disease caused by bacteria in the genus
Ricketsia that's Ricketzia prasekii, named for Stanislas von Prausek. Sanaslos

(30:17):
von Prowsek and his colleague Enrique to Rochelima discovered this
bacterium and they both died of typhus, which they both
contracted in the course of their work. Howard Ricketts also
contracted typhus while working in Mexico City, and he died
there on May tenth, nineteen ten, at the age of
only thirty nine. With the Rocky Mountain spotted fever bacterium

(30:40):
and its vector both identified, the next big focus was
on trying to stop the disease. Today, doxycycline is the
typical treatment for several diseases in the Ricketzia genus, including
both rocky Mountain spotted fever and epidemic typhus, but the
first true antibiotic, Pennacia villain, wasn't isolated until nineteen twenty eight,

(31:03):
and doxycycline wasn't patented until nineteen fifty seven, so in
the early twentieth century, the focus was on trying to
control ticks. Researchers had pinpointed a number of animals that
were susceptible to Rocky Mountain spotted fever and were often
bitten by tick, larvae and nymphs. That included various squirrels, chipmunks,

(31:26):
and rats. But the bigger concern from a public health
perspective was the animals that were being bitten by adult
ticks and also bringing those ticks into close proximity with humans.
Those were mostly cattle and other livestock, and this is where.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Things got wild. Doctor Robert Cooley was head of Montana
State College's Department of Entomology and Zoology. He was inspired
by the work of Howard Ricketts and two of his
colleagues had gotten Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the course
of their work and had died. Cooley's proposal was to
reduce the number of ticks that humans were exposed to

(32:06):
by reducing their numbers in cattle. He worked with the
Montana State Board of Entomology to develop a dipping program.
Dipping stations would be set up around the affected area
and filled with vats of pesticide, and ranchers would drive
their cattle to those stations, where they would swim through
the liquid in the vats. This effort was funded by

(32:28):
the federal government and the state of Montana.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
The solution that the cattle were going to swim through
was made from arsenic soap, kerosene, and water. Obviously, since
the point was to kill ticks, the solution needed to
include substances that would be toxic, and arsenic and kerosene
both fit that bill. Today we know that arsenic is

(32:53):
a carcinogen, but at the time, the more immediate and
the known concern was that if the constant creation of
arsenic was too high in this dip, it would burn
the cattle. It would especially burn them on parts of
their bodies, like their utters that were not as densely
covered in hair. Authorities had to work out the best

(33:13):
proportions of arsenic through trial and error. Also, Montana ranchers
weren't exactly people who were known for being excited about
complying with the government. Being ordered to do something that
could hurt their cattle made that already existing conflict even worse.
Many ranchers refused to have dipping vats located on their land,

(33:37):
worried not just about their own cattle, but about ticks
being brought in on other ranchers cows who were coming
to be dipped. In June of nineteen thirteen, someone smashed
the dipping vat in Hamilton, Montana with a sledge hammer,
and about a week later someone blew up the vat
in Florence, Montana with dynamite. The rancher whose Hamilton proper,

(34:00):
the first vaut was on, was tried and acquitted for
malicious mischief, and afterward he sued the officials who were
running the program. Eventually, authorities did develop a formulation for
the dip that seemed safe enough for the cattle, although
the arsenic was still a carcinogen, something not really understood

(34:20):
until later. Within a few years, there was less resistance
to the dipping program and most cattle in the area
were being dipped as well as sheep, horses and goats.
The number of Rocky Mountain spotted fever cases started to drop,
although there was a case of two children who had
been helping at the dipping station on their famili's land

(34:42):
contracting the disease and dying. The presence of Rocky Mountain
spotted fever and the efforts to control it led to
the establishment of Rocky Mountain laboratories, which we mentioned earlier
in our discussion of lime disease. In nineteen twenty one,
the US Public Health Service started venting an unused schoolhouse
west of Hamilton, Montana, to function as a laboratory, rather

(35:06):
than disease researchers having to work mostly out of tents
and sheds. In nineteen twenty six and nineteen twenty seven,
a dedicated entomological lab was built in Hamilton, and people
in the area were so worried about disease carrying ticks
escaping from the facility that it was also surrounded by
a moat, although that moat was never filled with water.

(35:28):
The decision to build a moat followed a series of
lawsuits people filed to try to stop the facility from
being built.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
At all.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
By then, doctors Roscoe Spencer and Ralph Parker had developed
a vaccine for Rocky Mountain spotted fever using tissue from
infected ticks that was then treated with phenol. This vaccine
was in use in humans by nineteen twenty seven. It
was at least somewhat effective. In nineteen thirty seven, Rocky

(35:58):
Mountain Laboratories became part of the National Institutes of Health.
That same year, the movie green Light starring Errol Flynn,
told the fictionalized story of a surgeon studying Rocky Mountain
spotted fever in Montana. Errol Flynn is of course better
known for his more swashbuckling roles like Various Pirates and
Cowboys and even Robin Hood. Today, as we said earlier,

(36:22):
Rocky Mountain Laboratories is part of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It is today also home to
one of the United States Maximum Containment Laboratories, known as
a biosafety Level for facility. It no longer has a
moat we should bring back moats despite its name. Today

(36:42):
in the US, Rocky Mountain spotted fever is most common
not in the Rocky Mountains, but in the southern and
Central Atlantic states. More than sixty percent of cases are
reported in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. It's
also present in other parts of the world that are
home to the various species of ticks that can carry it,

(37:04):
and in some of those places it has its own eponyms,
including sal pallo fever and Brazilian spotted fever. In Brazil,
there is no commercially available vaccine today, and while it
can be treated with antibiotics, it can be hard to diagnose,
especially if someone doesn't recall being bitten by a tick.

(37:24):
As with lime disease, the main method for prevention is
avoiding tick bites. That vaccine that had been developed back
in the twenties, once antibiotics came on the market, was
no longer really made. The tips for avoiding tick and
mosquito bites are pretty much the same for all of them.
Wear long sleeves and long pants, and use insect repellent
that's the big stuff. Try to stay out of very

(37:46):
tall grass for ticks. Also, try not to be around
outside around dawn and dusk for most breeds of mosquito.
Some breeds of mosquito don't really care about that though,
and they will come tied about you at any time.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
They don't have watches, they don't know when their schedule begins.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
When I was living in the Atlanta area, my neighborhood
had a lot of Asian tiger mosquitos and they were
out at all times of the day and they would
bite me between getting out of the car and getting
into the house after I got home from work. It's
a full time job being an Asian tiger mosquito. Yeah,
I was not a fan of them. Anyway. We'll talk

(38:23):
more about these things on Friday. I have an email
for our listener mail from listener Stephanie, and Stephanie wrote,
Hello Tracy and Holly. The phrase do your own research
is one commonly heard or posted online. This has led
me to wonder how, in the age of AI generated responses,
crowdsourced Wikipedia pages, and self proclaimed experts on YouTube and TikTok,

(38:47):
does one find reliable sources online that provide a factual
and supported information. Since so much of your work involves research,
I thought you might be able to point me toward
some resources. My goal is eventually to take a class
or course to learn more about how to conduct proper
research from credible sources. My ultimate goal is to teach
my young son to differentiate fact from opinion and credible

(39:09):
sources from dubious ones. Thank you for the many years
you have kept me company during long commutes, sleepless nights,
and painful Excel based work projects. As a lifelong learner,
I hope to hear your voices for many more years
to come. Sincerely, yours, Stephanie. Stephanie did not have pet

(39:30):
pictures to share and instead sent a little human made
completely from scratch. Unfortunately, little human picture did not come
through for whatever reason. I will assume this human is adorable.
Thank you for this email, Stephanie. I first want to
acknowledge that the rise of large language models and generative

(39:54):
AI has made this a lot harder. So much so
I'm gonna say thing number one. Currently, I am still
using Google to do a lot of searching. There are
other search engine options. They all have pros and cons.
In Google, if you put minus AI at the end,

(40:18):
you should stop getting an AI summary at the top,
and I highly encourage this. Do you.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
For clarity? Are you typing out the word minus or are.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
You using the minus sign, the dash, the dash yeah,
dash AI to mean minus the AI summary is often wrong. Yeah.
Uh And when I have not put that in there,
I have had laughably wrong AI summaries in things related
to UH to work when I'm doing research. And something

(40:52):
I really would like everyone to understand is that when
it comes to things like chat, GPT and other generative
a I, the process by which they give correct answers
is the same as the process by which they generate
things that are plausible but wrong. This is not something

(41:14):
that AI developers can fix. It is inherent into how
these models work. They will always be giving wrong answers
that sound right. Do not ask chat GPT for information
on stuff, is my opinion, because it might give you
the right answer, but it might give you the answer
that sounds right and is wrong.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
It's a day troll, it is. It really is.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Also, on a less serious note, if you like me,
play video games and sometimes you need a hint for
something because you're stuck. If you don't put in the
minus AI at the end, the AI summary is just
going to show you the full on answer. It might
be the right answer, it might not, but like it's
not going to give you it's not going to point

(41:59):
you to a page where someone has written a discrete
hint that can help you toward the right answer. It's
going to show you the right thing in your face.
I don't like that. I'm laughing because do you remember
for a minute what people were advising before minus AI
was to put a swear word at the end of
your query. Oh funny, because it wouldn't It would automatically

(42:23):
throw that out. Yes, but I ran into the problem
where I was ending up on websites that I did
not need to be visiting. Sure. Ever, Yeah, and now
I'm on the KG part of the internet.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
There are also plugins that will strip out the AI
summaries and other browsers that just don't do AI summaries,
but just the circles background don't rely on the AI summaries.
A lot of the other tips are the same as
they were prior to the evely of generative AI, which

(43:02):
is figuring out who is responsible for a piece of
content and what their reasoning is for doing it. So,
like confirming that the byline on the piece or the
name that the person has given in their YouTube or
TikTok video, like confirming that is a real person do

(43:24):
they work for? For example, a college or a university.
When I used to train people on this as part
of my job, we talked about the use of government sources.
A lot of those government sources are now being deliberately undermined.
We've already talked on the show before about like public
health expertise being stripped out of the health and medicine

(43:46):
related government agencies to be replaced with literal quacks. So
I can't really advocate for that anymore the way that
I used to. But a good starting point is often
to like confer firm who this person is, read their
you know, their biography, their brief bio on whatever do

(44:08):
they where do they work, what is their background? Why
are they writing about this? And over time you can
kind of develop list of sources that you trust, who
you know if someone has an agenda, that agenda is
to get real, factual, accurate information, not to for example,

(44:29):
cherry pick badly constructed studies to say that thailanol causes autism.
It doesn't. This is actually well established through many years
of research that have happened in multiple places around the world,
specifically looking at whether thilan al also called acetaminifit. I
don't remember what the name is and most of the
rest of the world. But like we've already studied this,

(44:52):
we know that it does not cause autism. And once again,
even if it did cause autism, people are talking about
autism as though it is like the worst thing in
the world. When autistic people are human beings whose minds
work and process information a little differently than people who

(45:15):
aren't autistic, and it's also a spectrum. There are bajillion
things I feel like we have to say every time
this comes up. I know. The other thing, right, is
that autism is incredibly complex and there's no one thing.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
That causes it.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Right, often there are guesses about many layers of things
that may have led to it, right, but there's no
one thing where you go, no, it's this. We went
through this with the vaccine thing a million years ago,
and yet here it is again. Yeah, yeah, we know
for sure that there is no causal relationship between vaccines

(45:58):
and autism or cedamnifin during pregnancy and autism, and yet
it's being trotted out again. Also, a cedamnifin during pregnancy
is one of the few things you can take for
a fever, and a fever that goes unchecked during pregnancy
can actually cause some very real problems, and that is
studied and documented. Yes, I have very strong feelings about

(46:22):
this for someone that neither has nor wants children, right,
I really don't like making parents feel like they're doing
it all wrong when most parents just want to do
the best for their kids, right right, right. So yeahs
I don't know. I feel like we are still figuring
out what all the best steps to take are regarding

(46:45):
how to get information that's accurate in the age of
large language models and chat bots and generative AI. But
the broad sweeping things are don't trust AI generated stuff,

(47:06):
whether it's video or audio or text.

Speaker 1 (47:09):
It is likely to be wrong.

Speaker 2 (47:11):
In the process of coming up with wrong answers is
the same process that yields right answers in other cases
and destroys.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
The environment in the process. Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
It uses a lot of electricity. A lot of places
that have data centers for these nearby are really struggling
with their energy use and energy bills. And boy do
I hate it when there's like an everybody, please don't
run your air conditioning so much when it's ninety seven degrees.
While we are actually going to give some tax breaks

(47:43):
to the giant data center that is causing an inordinate
use of electricity. Anyway, that's not actually related to Stephanie's question.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
Stephanie, you've opened pandors.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Yeah, we're both having a time over here today. So yeah, big,
big part of it is just figuring out who wrote something,
what is their background, why did they write it? And
that continues to be true even as so much more
stuff on the Internet and elsewhere is being generated by

(48:17):
chatbot of some sort. If you would like to send
us a note about this or any other podcast, we're
at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. If your email
is about how large language models are great and we
should stop being blood heightes, I want you to listen
to our episode about blood heightes and what that word

(48:38):
really means, and then, better yet, just keep the emails
for yourself. You can subscribe to our show also on
iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the ie her radio app,

(49:00):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Speaker 1 (49:07):
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