April 4, 2026 • 48 mins
If you live in the Northeastern U.S. then you may know someone who has had Lyme disease. But it's spreading all over the country and parts of the world. Learn all about this tick-borne disease in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey guys, it's Josh Josh Clark. No, not that Josh
Clark you went to high school with. Sorry to get
your hopes up like that. This is Josh Clark from
that podcast you listen to Stuff You Should Know, And
for this week's SYSK Select, I'd chosen our September twenty
nineteen episode on lime disease. This one's pretty fascinating because
it turns out lime disease has a ton of intrigue
(00:23):
associated with it. It started out with a cluster of
weird symptoms of people in Connecticut, and then they finally
figured out it was coming from tics. But the mystery
wasn't over because people started developing chronic lime and at
first the medical community didn't believe they had any disease whatsoever.
They thought it was all in their heads. Well they
were wrong. You can find out about all this and
(00:45):
more in this episode on lime disease.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. This
is Stuff you Should Know the podcast. Yeah, Chuck, I
have a question for you. Yes, you know it kicks
me OFFLME disease.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm so mad at you.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Blame you me for that one. She's like, you should
say this, and I said, you know what, I'm I
should totally say that.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah. This is sort of a follow up to our
July twenty seventh, twenty ten episode Why Ticks Suck In,
which which is sort of a legendary episode because we
falsely promised to send people T shirts if they made
it all the way through the episode. That's right, We're
just kidding. But we still get those requests of wears
my shirt.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yes, that's hilarious. I forgot about that and also get
sued today.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah. Probably. So. Also want to point out and shout
out our former website HowStuffWorks dot com because a couple
of the articles that we use for much of this
episode is from the old HSW website.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Nice, they're holding it down over there.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
They're holding it down and this is real good stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah. So we're talking today about lime disease.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
In particular, not limes.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
No, we should say it's capital l ym disease. And
the reason it's called that is because it's named after
a town which is one of three towns where the
initial outbreak of lime disease that led to this bacterial
infection persistent bacterial infection was first describe medically.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
One of the facts of the show. I think, oh yeah, sure,
who knew it was named after a town, Lime, Connecticut?
I knew did you know that before this?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Did we cover that? And why tik suck?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
All right, well, you're smarter than me that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
No, it's not that. I think what got me was
I I heard about people saying, like, no lime disease,
like people take it for granted, but it's actually some
this really mysterious illness. And I'm like, what are you
talking about? So I think I looked into this year's
back and that's what I found out.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
All right, that was all So we're equally smart.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right exactly, I'm not smarter than you.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
What is smart? It's just like someone happens to know
one thing, someone else knows another. Sure, I say, they
cancel out, we're all smart here you goo.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I'm glad you pulled that out because I would have
been like, what is smart? I couldn't have come up
with the definition.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
So lime disease, We'll go ahead and hit you with
a couple of stats here. Lime disease in the United
States is more than doubled since nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
That's astounding, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And it has spread too. It used to be very
much localized in kind of the Northeast, sort of mid
Atlantic areas, some in the South, but now you can
get lime disease. And I believe the entire lower forty
eight is that correct.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There are cases in all forty eight states. Supposedly half
of the counties in the United States now are considered
a high risk for lime disease. And like all of
this happened just in the last like twenty or so years. Yeah,
which is I mean, there's a lot of debate over
the CDC calls lime disease endemic, which is a disease
(04:21):
that has become a like an ongoing part of an
area or region, and some other people are saying, guys,
what we're talking about here is an epidemic. This is
an epidemic, and you should start calling it that because
it will kind of raise the alarm to the next
level or two where it should be. Because this is
a very alarming spread of disease that we're seeing right now,
(04:44):
lime disease is the number one vector borne disease in
the United States. It's way more prevalent than things like
West Nile or chicken gooony or anything like that, but
it's still kind of treated as like up there in
the northeastern US thing, and that's just not the case.
It's spread in every direction except east because it hit
(05:04):
the Atlantic, but everywhere else where. It can spread into
the interior of the United States and up into Canada.
It's starting to.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, and there's also a history continuing to this day
even where lime disease can be overlooked, misdiagnosed, not taken
as seriously by your doctor as it should be, including
what we'll get to later on something called post treatment
lime disease syndrome. And it's all very frustrating if you
(05:34):
have been an individual that has had lime disease. There's
a big community out there of people that are like,
why won't anyone listen to us, Why won't our doctors
take as seriously? And what do we have to do here?
Like do we have to start dropping dead?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of frustration in that community
because there's a sentiment among the medical establishment that.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
You know, he takes some antiotics.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Exactly, it's easy to cure lime disease. Here's some antibiotics.
You still have persistent symptoms. Those are probably in your head.
We're not going to say they're in your head, but
they're in your head. And the people who are experiencing
these symptoms are like, no, my life has been derailed
by these symptoms, and you guys aren't doing anything about it.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It's frustrating. I know there's a lot of people out
there that are pretty pretty stoked right now to be
hearing this. Yeah, you know for sure we're advocating for
you guys. Sure, not patting myself on the back, although
I am literally patty like.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I see you chuck here. That albow is sticking out
pretty far. So.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Lime disease is a disease. It's an infection caused by
the bacterium boro lea burgdorfrairi wow borg da faery burg
dea fraiari.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
We're gonna get you an apron and call you the
word butcher.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Burgdor fairy work more. And we'll get to why it's
called that in a bit. But if you haven't caught
on by now, it is transmitted through tick bites.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Right, So, a tick, and in particular a nymph stage
of a tick, which is a young adult or juvenile tick,
will transmit this bacteria, the Borellia burgdor fairy, into a human.
And the reason we usually get it from nymphs chuck
is because an adult tick doesn't find humans particularly appetizing,
(07:20):
but a nymph tick will because they're stupid, they don't
know anything yet. So as they're feeding on us. After
somewhere maybe around twenty four to thirty six hours of
feeding this infected tick that has this bacteria in it,
the bacteria will make its way from the mid gut
to the tick saliva and the tick transmit it transmits
it into the human bloodstream, where it just absolutely wreaks
(07:43):
havoc on the human body.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, and you said something really key there, twenty four
thirty six, forty eight hours later, really really important. They
have to be attached to you for that long, sometimes
even longer to transmit this bacterium. So if you find
a tick on you and you get it off, if
you don't need to sweat lime disease, no, if you
get it off in due time.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Right exactly, If like you see it's still crawling on you.
It's unattached, you don't worry about it at all. But
when it is attached and when it has transmitted the
bacteria what it's transmitted, This be burgdor Ferry is like
really amazing at its job, which is infecting you, giving
you a bacterial infection. It has figured out how to
(08:27):
zoom through the bloodstream but then also take itself out
of the bloodstream by latching onto the walls of your
blood vessels.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, this was crazy about this cellular stuff that once
it's attached to a cell. They said, it's like a slinky.
It doesn't let go. It just like basically reaches out
and grabs the next cell without letting go of the
previous cell and just sort of walks end over end right,
never unattaching.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Itself right exactly. So as it's moving along, it's never
it's not going to get kind of you know, washed
away and the extracellular matrix it's stuck to the cell.
If it wants to be stuck in the cell, it
can do the same thing to the blood vessel walls
to pull itself out of the bloodstream and then go
attack you know, specific parts of the body, So it's
(09:12):
really good at hanging on. That's one thing that makes
it kind of pernicious. And then another thing exactly, it's
basically yeah, it's like the bacteria version of a tick.
I didn't think about that. And then another thing it does, Chuck,
I think this is really really recent research. It can
actually change its protein expression at a much faster rate
(09:33):
than the normal mutation rate for bacteria, something like fifteen
times faster.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, And what that does is that just makes it
really hard for our human immune system to catch up to.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
It, right, because our immune system will produce antibodies based
on the initial infection, but by the time the antibodies
come around, the bacteria may have changed itself so that
the antibodies won't recognize it. They'll just go right past
it because it doesn't it doesn't fit the description that
the antibodies have.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
That's right, And you'll know that something bad is happening
first of all if you find that tick. But if
you get headaches, fever, fatigue is a huge, huge symptom.
But the real telltale is what's called em It's an
expanding skin rash called erythema migrants and it's like it's
(10:25):
that circular pattern. And then we did talk about this
on the Ticks episode. But it's a circular pattern with
what looks like a bull's eye in the center of it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, and you can take off your butcher's apron now
because you just that was beautiful, put on your chef's
chef's hat.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You're sweating over there.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So that that particular rash, that bullseye rash, that is
like a just an absolute telltale sign that you have
a line boreolis boreliosis infection that only comes around and
like maybe seventy to eighty percent of cases. I think
(11:03):
if every person got that rash, we would not have
this problem with lime disease because it would be caught
very quickly because you get that within usually about a
week or less of getting infected. But it doesn't come
up in all cases. And with some of those other
symptoms like you said, like weakness, headaches, flu like symptoms
(11:26):
like those could be a lot of different other things,
joint pain, and so the lime disease infection goes undiagnosed
or misdiagnosed in a lot of cases, are did for
many many years. It's just now that they're starting to
kind of recognize it or suspect lime when otherwise they
might not have.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah. I mean literally hundreds of things can be can
have the same symptoms as lime disease. So lime's been
around for a long time. We'll talk about the history
here in a minute, as far as the nineteen seventies
go and official recognition, but it's been around. I believe
the Yale School of Public Health find the bacterium in
(12:06):
ancient North America, like sixty thousand years old before the
arrival of humans. They have an autopsy of a fifty
three hundred year old mummy that had lime disease.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, you know Utzi the Iceman, remember him?
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I remember Uzzy?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah. I was disappointed that they referred to him as
a fifty three hundred year old mummy. It's like, no,
it's Utzi the ice everybody knows him, give him his name.
But he had lime disease.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
He did. And there was a German physician named Alfred
Buckwald who described this that em skin rash that we
now call lime disease about one hundred and thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Right, So lime disease has been around a while, but
we are just now seeing a huge again an epidemic
of it, and in a massive spread of it, not
just in North America, but there's also two other kinds
of ticks that transmit two other kinds of lime causing
bacteria in Europe and Asia, and in all three places,
(13:08):
North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, the incidence of
lime diseases picking up at an alarming pace.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
I think we should slow down our pace. Take break. Okay,
all right, we'll come back and we'll talk about Lime
Connecticut right after this. All right, So Lime, Connecticut. Something
(13:54):
is very old hat to you.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Right it for years Lime Old Lime?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And what was the third town? I don't remember, No,
let's just call it New Lime. It was.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Notice, they're going to be so mad. Their high school
football team is going to go brazik on Old Lime
this year.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
In the nineteen seventies, though, there were a group of
children and adults in these towns in Connecticut that were
having all these weird symptoms swollen knees, skin rashes, headaches,
all this severe fatigue. And it's bad enough these days,
But in the early nineteen seventies, doctors were definitely did
not have this on the radar and were very dismissive
(14:34):
of what was going on in these towns and if
it were not for the work of Judith Minch and
Polly Murray too, just regular moms. Although Polly Murray did
work for the World Health Organization for a while. They
were advocates. They were patient advocates because their families were
getting sick and no one would listen. And they were like,
someone's got to do something. Something's going on here, and
(14:58):
these doctors are not being any help, right, And it
was a big deal. Polly Murray ended up writing a book.
She made it sort of her life's work in nineteen
ninety six, a book called The Widening Circle. And because
of sort of the persistent sexism and science, they were
largely discounted, even though they had a list of thirty
seven individuals they researched on their own, contacted scientists. We
(15:22):
just really need to shout them out. Polly Murray died
just about a month ago at the age of eighty five.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh is that right? Yeah, Yeah, she was a persistent
cuss as they call them up in the Yankee States.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So on the one hand, yes, from the everything I've
read and all the impressions I have. They were very
much dismissed, and it was very much sexist and also
I think because they weren't doctors. But on the other hand,
the doctors who were being presented with these cases were like,
I have no idea what this is, so let's just
pretend it's not real. But luckily those two women in
(15:57):
the groups that they established, they went on and they
contacted Yale Medical School, they contacted the state, and they
really kind of put this on the map. They said,
there is a mysterious epidemic that's going on where you
have a lot of kids who suddenly have juvenile arthritis
out of nowhere. What are you guys going to do
about it? And because of their agitation, this mystery made
(16:19):
its way to the desk or I guess, the microscope
of a guy named Willie Bergdorffer, and he was at
the time the world's foremost authority on what's called Rocky
Mountain spotted fever, which is another tickborn bacterial infection.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
I remember that when I was a kid, that was
a big news item. It was a scary one.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
He was working out in Colorado, and Colorado was ground
zero for Rocky Mountain spotted fever. For a while, which is, yeah,
you do not want to have that. It's a really
bad bacterial infection. But by this time they had done
thanks to the legwork done by the moms and the
patient advocate groups in the Lime, Connecticut, it had been
(17:01):
pretty well established that the common thread between all these people,
besides where they lived and by the way, it was
chuck lyme Old Lime and East HadAM sorry East HadAM
aside from the fact that they all lived in the
same region, was that all of them were almost all
of them were called being bitten by a tick, and
a lot of them had a mysterious rash right before
(17:23):
the symptoms presented. So it came to this guy, Willie
Bergdorffer's microscope because they had said, there's something in the
ticks here that is creating this disease that we haven't
encountered before.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
That's right, and he had already discovered this bacterium called
it How do you how do you pronounce that spirit.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Chat spira keet, spire key, But spira keet is a
type of bacteria, and that's what that's what they all, right,
spirra chet and you just made me think of the
older brother Chet and weird.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Now go make yourself one. But what.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Man? That guy had some good quotes.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Oh yeah, rip what what Bill Paxton when he died
a couple of years ago? Very sad?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Are you sure I'm thinking of Bill Pullman?
Speaker 3 (18:18):
No, Bill Paxton died. It was so sad because I
had just listened to his uh Mark Maron interview and
he was like, after that episode, I wanted nothing more
than to be Bill Paxton's friend and neighbor. He just
sounded like the best guy and best family man. And
he passed away way too early.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, really, I did not know about that.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I saw Frailty not too many weeks ago. It's still
pretty good.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Was it the first viewinger?
Speaker 1 (18:42):
No? No, no, I've seen it before.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
But yeah, man, great movie.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah. But he wrote and I believe directed and starred
in it.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah. It was so good. And I love a good
Powers Booth cast and call.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
For sure it was. It was unusual and surprising.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But it was perfect, very good, underrated film. Where are we? Oh?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yeah, we were talking about Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Willie
Bergdorfer identifying the spiro keet that was causing.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Lime hirakeet right, spira chet What a dumb, dumb.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah. No, remember we established we're all smart.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
He Yeah, So he discovered this, this parakeet, and he
was honored by this discovery and naming that thing after himself.
That's why it has that interesting name.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I get the impression. And he didn't name it after himself.
They named it after him to go on.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, okay, but.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
There's a big difference between him saying this thing's called
the Burgdorferey bacteria and somebody saying we're going to name
this after you.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
No, I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Okay, So Burgdorfrey or Burgdorfer. He figures out what is
the basis of lime disease, which is great. That's an
enormous breakthrough. It establishes that yes, it is its own thing,
it's its own disease. And because it was a bacteria,
it's a spier key, which again it's a kind of
a snakelike shaped bacteria specific kind that walks like a slinky.
(20:11):
Because it was a bacterial infection, the medical establishment said, oh,
we got this here. Take some antibiotics, and over the
course of several years, starting in I think the nineties,
is when they really started to say, okay, we can
cure lyme disease, especially if we catch it early on
by a two to four week round of antibiotics. Right,
(20:33):
here you go, and they said, case closed, we're the
medical establishment. Let's go have a party for ourselves.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah, And here's the thing, Like many times that can
take care of the problem. So it's not like they
were just lazy and not doing their work. But I
think they closed the book a little too soon, and
a lot of people do because that oral that round
of oral antibiotics, if you catch it early, it can
really work. But and I think they say, what like
(21:01):
nine times out of ten, if you catch it early,
then that will that will work right there.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So they're so persistent with that assertion that if you
find a tick on yourself and you live in an
area where lime disease is known to thrive, if you
can't say how long that tick's been on you, they're
probably just going to give you a round of antibiotics portolactically. Yeah.
And again, like you said, in a lot of cases,
(21:28):
and I believe, from what I've read, the vast majority
of cases in early stage lime disease, that round of
antibiotics should work.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah, And they say that if you and This is
from the American Lime Diesus Foundation quote. If you live
in an endemic area, have symptoms consistent with early lime disease,
and suspect recent exposure to a tick, present your suspicion
to your doctor so that he or she may make
a more informed diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So show up to your doctor and say, yeah, madam,
I would love to present my suspicions to you. Please
sit down.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Well, they're saying sort of, still, you still sort of
need to be your own advocate because it is so
hard to diagnose. Still, because if you're going on symptoms alone,
like we said, there are hundreds of things that share
those symptoms and lime disease may not be the first
thing they think of.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
That's a huge problem with lime disease. Another huge problem
is that the test we use to test for lime
disease doesn't actually test for the b burgdorfree bacteria. It
tests for the antibodies that should be present in your
bloodstream if you have a bacterial infection, not even specific
to that one, but a bacterial infection. The problem is
(22:40):
it takes days, if not maybe a week or two
before your body mounts an effective immune response against this infection.
So if you find a tick and they give you
a test, say within the first couple of days, it's
going to come back negative. Even though you very much
have a Burgdor free infection, it's going to come negative
(23:00):
because it's the antibodies haven't been created yet. The other
part of the problem is even if you take a
blood test that tests directly for the Burgdor free bacterium,
it moves out of the blood stream really easily and
within its several days. So there's a very brief window
of time where you can directly test for the Burgdor
(23:21):
free bacteria and find it in a simple blood test.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, you can also get false positives, and they're advocating
now for two tiered testing for confirmation of the diagnosis.
So if you get that first positive test sometimes now
you'll get a different test, a Western block test, right,
that's gonna really get more specific to that antibody, not
just the general antibodies.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Right. So part of the other problem is the reason
a lot of patient activists and patient advocate groups say no, doctors,
you're wrong, like this is not good enough, is that
there's a sneaking suspicion among people who have what's called
chronic lime or post treatment lime disease syndrome is that
(24:07):
the round of antibiotics, the two to four week round
of antibiotics that seemingly cured the lime disease symptoms, that
you had actually failed to fully knock out the bacteria
that created this infection, that created this lime disease in
the first place, that it just burrowed further into your body.
And because the medical establishment said we got it, it's fine,
(24:31):
these antibiotics cured it and didn't go deeper, that bacterial
infection is allowed to fester and then present in worse
ways later.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, and it's a really big deal because you know
what will happen is they'll say, you're cured. We gave
these antibiotics. They worked. But weeks and months and even
years later, when people have persistent fatigue and muscle aches
and headaches and you know, like your knee joints hurt,
they said, like a brain full can happen. And these
(25:01):
are all things that are I don't want to say generic,
but if you walk into your doctor and say I
feel like I'm fuzzy and I have a brain fog
and get headaches and I'm tired, it's sort of a
wide it's hard to pinpoint what's going on. Sure, and
they think you're cured of the lime disease. So that's
where some of the more dismissive, at least from the
(25:25):
lime disease community. They're saying, like, I have this chronic issue,
and they're saying, but no, there's no such thing as
a chronic issue. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Well, they're also saying like, look, we gave you a
test for lime disease and you came back negative. Right
you know, we know you had it before we tested you.
We came back positive, We treat you with antibiotics. Now
we've tested you again and it's coming back negative. You
don't have lime disease anymore. So there's a huge debate
whether they're the antibiotic course is not enough and that
(25:54):
the lime disease is persisting elsewhere in the body, and
that maybe it's changed its form so that it won't
show up on the tests like it should, or there's
remnants of it. I saw one article that suggested that
the cell wall from the spiro keat the brigdor free
spiro keet can remain even after the thing's dead and
(26:15):
persistent joint tissue and cause an immune response there, which
would explain this long term arthritis is like a post
treatment line disease syndrome symptom. Or is it that it
converts into an entirely different disease, like an autoimmune disorder.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, some people think that it could trigger an autoimmune
response and the infection's gone, and this is what's happening
later on. Is you have this autoimmune response, it can
lead to other things like rheumatic heart disease. I think
we do we cover Keon Bear syndrome or just talk
about it in different episodes.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
We've talked about it, and I think if I remember
correctly as Gia Barre.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
GiB, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, we could both be wearing the apron for this
one though.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Well, we'll split it up. I get the doer half.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
All right, I get the top half. I'm porky pigging
it all right.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
I'm going to just cover my bits down there. But
regardless of what's happening, what people know is is that
they don't feel right, and it's extremely frustrating to feel
these symptoms months and years later and not be taken
seriously in a doctor's office.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, so a lot of people are saying that these
this course of antimbiotics shouldn't be two to four weeks,
it should be many months, because you really need to
get all of the spiral keet out of there or
else it's going to persist and you're going to have
big problems. And then the medical establishment is saying, like
what you're talking about doesn't even exist. So there's a
lot of frustration that you're saying a big disconnect, and
(27:50):
this is something that is probably going to keep playing out,
although it seems like it may be on its way
out because of the epidemic proportions line is taking now
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Yeah, I mean, the statistics are mounting up such that
it can't be ignored any longer. Not that it was ignored,
but you know that's probably a harsh statement, but it's
being taken away more seriously now.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, I saw something like there's an expectation that there's
going to be something like three hundred to four hundred
thousand new cases of lime disease in the United States alone,
and that ten to twenty percent of those patients will
end up with chronic lime disease.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time
hiking around the woods with my dogs and have pulled
plenty of ticks off of them and plenty of ticks
off of myself. And I have fatigue a lot because
I have a four year old and every now and
then I'm like, do I have lime disease?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well? Probably not, And here's why.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Well, I've never had the bulls eye. First of all, okay,
that's a big one.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
But also the ticks you pull off of your dog,
those are dog ticks. They do not transmit lime. It's
specifically the long late or black legged tick, which is
a type of deer tick.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Well, but here's the thing. There are plenty of deer
ticks in the woods. Are you saying that they if
they would not latch onto a dog, and they'd be.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Like, ooh, no, I don't know. I don't know, because
there's deer ticks all over the woods. Sure, there definitely are.
I don't know if deer ticks will latch onto a dog.
It's entirely possible they won't, since there's such a differentiation
between dog ticks and deer ticks. But I do know
that dog ticks don't transmit lime.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Well, I think we should talk about my favorite thing
from the ticks episode, And this is one I will
lay on people from time to time is remember how
ticks attach themselves. Sure, they just hang out on blades
of grass and things and just snap their little claws constantly,
just waiting for something to pass by.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yet they think can latch onto, right, they sense the
co two of the mammal that's walking past.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
So interesting and chuck.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
One thing I read is that somehow the lime lime
infected ticks because they're infect of themselves. Lime resides as
in like small mammals and rodents as a reservoir. Yeah,
they are infected, but they don't have symptoms. Ticks get
infected with this stuff and they're just passing it along.
It's not like they're the ultimate source of lime disease.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
No, ticks are misunderstood.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
They're really great, right, But from what I saw, the
ticks that are infected with the lime bacteria are actually
better at finding hosts than non infected ticks. Like it
somehow enables them to be better parasites. It's interesting.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, that sounds familiar. Did we cover that or do
I just know that?
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Because I don't, I don't remember, but I do I
remember you talking about in the Tics episode about how
they wave their arms in the air when somebody passed by,
and I remember one of our listeners made some art
of that. We got to find it.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
That's right. And from snapping their little fingers on a
blade of grass to my dog's but to my scrotum,
it's quite a to ride.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
It's a wild ride.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
And then to Emily eventually plucking that thing out for me,
that's nice, gotta that's what marriage is all about, folks.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, you just have your forearm thrust across your eyes.
You're like, get it out, get it out.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Uh. So let's take another break. Okay, we'll talk a
little bit about prevention and then a little bit about
some very recent interesting wacky things going on in Congress
about lime disease as a bio weapon.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Okay, okay, Chuck, you talked about prevention. How do you
(31:59):
keep from having to have a tick pulled from your crotch?
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Don't ever go into mother Nature. Just stay in your
mid century modern home with tiled floors, and don't go
into the woods. Sounds delicious, No, I love the woods.
You love the woods? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, I love watching the Woods on television.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Yeah, from your midcentury house.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
No, I do. I love the woods myself.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, I'm just kidding, get in the woods, but they
recommend things like deet. I don't use that stuff on
my own body, but some people will say put that
all over your body and put it on your clothes,
and put it on your socks and shoes and.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Just walk around spring a cloud of it around you
constantly while you're in the woods.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
What I do is I just check for ticks.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, a good thing to do, Seriously, it looks super dorky,
but what do you care is to tuck your pant
legs into your socks. Yeah, sure, when and then when
you come out, like wear light colors too, because you
can see the ticks a lot more easily. And then
when you when you come out of the woods, take
your clothes off and take a shower as soon as
(33:05):
you can, and just inspect yourself. Inspect you're growing your armpits,
your scalp. Part of the problem with lime disease, though,
is remember you get it from TIMPs? Do you get
it from ticks in the nymph stage which are really
really small. So you've got to check really really well
to see if you have that tick on you.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, and just while you're at it, take off the
adult tics as well. Yeah, don't don't just leave those
and check your dogs. You know, you check your dogs
under their haunches, like on the armpit of their legs
whatever that's called their leg pits. Check behind their ears,
check under their collars, because ticks are trying to you know,
they're not going to hang out just like on the
(33:46):
top of their back. They may start there, but they're
going to try and find a place that's dark and
warm and out of view.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah. I don't mean to say you can't get lime
disease from an adult chuck. It's just that the nymphs
are far more likely to eat on a human than
an adult is. But a lime infected adult tick will
transmit sure lyn to you too.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
For sure, A very important distinction. So now we move
on to the US Congress. Very recently, about a month ago,
end of July. I think, yeah, there was a US
House rep named Chris Smith, a Republican out of New Jersey,
who introduced legislation that said, hey, Department of Defense, you
should review these claims that I'm seeing that our own
(34:32):
Pentagon researched using tics to spread lime disease as a
bioweapon in the mid twentieth century. I'm reading a lot
about this in books and articles that we did research
on Plumb Island and and other insects too, not just ticks,
of turning them into bioweapons, and this thing passed. And
a lot of this comes from a book written by
(34:55):
Chris Newby called Bitten Colon The Secret History of Lime
Disease and Biological Weapons.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
And this book, like I think Chris Smith, the representative
from New Jersey said, like, this book really inspired me
to take up this legislation. But in the book, Newby
basically says, the government at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and on
Plum Island, New York, before it was turned into an
animal disease research center, we're doing.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
It was an insect disease research center before that, I guess.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
They were looking into well, they definitely were doing biowarfare
research there.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Early early nineteen fifties, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And then Fort Dietrich for however long if they're not
still doing it now, But they were apparently looking into
ticks as delivery systems for biological weapons.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
I couldn't find that that is actually verified, but I
find that highly believable. But what Newby is saying is
they were doing that research and then the way we
got line diseases, whatever research they were coming up with, escaped,
say a tick attached to a bird that flew off
of Plumb Island and landed in the area around Lyme, Connecticut,
(36:10):
and these ticks got off and they started to breed
and they became endemic in this area. And that's where
lime disease came from. There was actually a biological weapon
that was produced and then inadvertently, probably not purposefully released
into the larger population in the northeast.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah. So here's my question. I haven't read the book,
but are they saying that that we created lime disease
or that we just weaponized it, because those are two
very different things.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah. I don't know what she's saying either, and I
think she stopped short of saying that, but that it's
implied that if you put two and two together, the
government was looking into biological warfare and they were talking about,
you know, using ticks at some point, and you know,
it's really close to this ground zero of where the
(37:05):
tick epidemic began. You put two and two together, that's
the impression I have is that she didn't actually come
out and say it, but that she lets the readers
surmise for themselves, which is the problem.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Well, I mean, that's very easy to disprove if she's
actually claiming that they created lime disease, because we just
got through saying it was in who was the Mummy Utsi?
It was in Utsi years ago over in the Alps. Well, true,
but it also in the United States. I mean, it
(37:38):
came around in the We first discovered it that in
nineteen seventies, and like several different places. It wasn't just
lime Connecticut. They found it in California, right, And you
can't just that just it doesn't add up that it
would be popping up in all these random places if
it escaped from Long Island Sound in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Right, which I think somebody who subscribed to this conspiracy
theory and is very much what it is, is a
conspiracy theory that well, then the release wasn't purpose or accidental.
It was purposeful that they spread it around the northeast
California and then Spooner, Wisconsin, which supposedly is the actual
place where the first case of lime disease was described
(38:16):
in the United States in nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, about
six years before this cluster of juvenile arthritis cases popped
up in old Lime Lime in East HadAM.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Well, it's a very bad idea if that's what went on,
because you have to depend on a lot of things,
which is A these tics definitely finding their way to
the enemy. B they attached to the enemy successfully and
transmit the disease. And then what does it transmit? A
very slow acting disease that will give people headaches and
(38:51):
fatigue over the course of a long time.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Right, that also produces a one of a kind, telltale rash,
Right that tells you, supposedly in plenty of time that
you have this this disease that needs to be treated
with a simple course of oral antibiotics.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, and it has to be probably in the country.
They don't thrive well in the city, right, So it's
just it doesn't make a good biological weapon.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
No. And then again people who subscribed as conspiracy theory say, well,
they can't all be winners. But maybe it was just
something they were experimenting with and it wasn't very good.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Trust me. I mean, we've done enough research on stuff
our American government used to do and continue to do that.
It's not the most outlandish thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
No, it's not. And that's also why Chris Smith, the
representative from New Jersey, shouldn't just be dismissed out of
hand because it's entirely plausible. It's yeah, it's not just
a complete wacko idea.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
The other reason Christmis shouldn't just be dismissed out of
hand is because he is a true lime warrior. He
introduced other legislation called the Tick Act, and of course
he had to make tick an achronism, that an acronym,
not a an acronism, stand for the Ticks Colon, Identify
Control and Knockout Act. He was really grasping like a
(40:08):
tick on a blade of grass with that one.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
But the point is, but knockout's not one word unless
you use it as knockout.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Well, that's what he's saying, I guess, because the work
goes act. But it would create an additional one hundred
and eighty million dollars in federal funding for lime disease research,
sorely needed.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Right now, that's awesome. I didn't know you was such
an advocate. That's good.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
He really is. He hates lime disease like like a lot.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
I was about to say something, but I wish I.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Could take a pill that would bulk up my analogy
region in my brain.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Oh, your analogies are great.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
What were you going to say? I want to know
we can beep it off.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
And I was going to get political. I was going
to say, he hates ticks like he hates Okay, can
we leave that and bleep it. I don't know, we'll
find out, all right.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So the whole idea that it's a bioweapon almost certainly
not the case, right, but it makes for good press.
I mean, like if you look up like lyme disease
and bioweapon. There is a lot of recent articles written
on it. Just because a member of Congress introduced this legislation.
What a lot of people are saying is, look, it
(41:19):
makes sense, like this conspiracy theory that people would go
to that. But on at the same time, there's another
really great explanation for it, and it's climate change that
this whole thing came about in the seventies, because we're
starting to see what was called the first epidemic from
(41:40):
climate change, and there's this really great article on Aon,
which is a great website by Mary Beth Pfeiffer spells
it like Michelle Pfiffer with the p called ticks Rising,
and she's an investigative reporter of science journalists who really
went to a lot of trouble to explain how climate
change has created a new world for ticks and we
(42:03):
are now living in it.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, I mean, in twenty fourteen, the EPA actually started
to use four new indicators about what's going on with
climate change and the impact, and one of them was
the spread of lime disease. So like the EPA officially
uses that as a factor in an indicator in determining
the impact of climate change now right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And so the whole basis of this idea is that
because of warmer weather, ticks are being killed off in
far fewer numbers from over the winter, so they're surviving
longer as it gets warmer and warmer, higher and higher
up their range is spreading rather rapidly. Oh yeah, and
wherever these tics go, lime disease is game to go
(42:48):
with them. So the spread of lime disease is increasing
as the spread of ticks is increasing too, And ticks
have gotten totally out of hand in some areas. In
that same Aon article, well, Mary Beth Pfeiffer was talking
about how moose are dying in their thousands in like
Wisconsin and the Dakotas because they're being bled to death
(43:12):
by one hundred thousand ticks at once.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's amazing that.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Never happened before. And now all of a sudden, it's
kind of becoming routine because the ticks aren't dying off
in the winter like they're supposed to. And again it's
because of climate change. And then in the Northeast, Chuck,
one of the reasons why there's been this explosion of
ticks is because there's been an explosion of deer to
support the tick population.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Sure, back in the day, there were things like mountain lions,
and there were predators that would help control the deer population. Yeah, wolves, wolves.
They are even suggesting reintroducing wolves to help control the
deer population.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Oh yeah, you can bet that's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
No really, no, I mean do you think so? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Totally. Like if three hundred thousand people a year are
coming down with lime in the United States, they're going
to are reintroducing wolves to combat if it has even
a half of a chance.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'd be interested to see if that happens for sure,
because humans are going to want to hunt those wolves.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, you know, it just brings it out in us
for some reason. Huh.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Well, I mean they hunted the mountain lions, right.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
But I think that's the idea of oh wait a minute,
really weird and circuit as bad things happen when we
overhunt mountain lions and wolves, maybe when we reintroduce them,
we won't have to, you know, or we won't follow
that impulse. We'll just let nature take its course.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Who knows you got anything else? Man?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
So there's a solution around antibiotics and some wolves, and
that'll cure what ails us.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah, advocate for yourself still, people, sure, and the.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Wolves be persistent. That's good advice for everything. Chuck agreed. Everything.
There's certainly cases where persistence is not a good idea,
But you.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Know what I'm saying, right, I do know.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Okay. If you want to know more about lyme disease,
go check out all of the articles they are to read.
And again, go check out the aon article by Mary
Beth fight for It's really interesting and since I said
it's interesting, that means it's time for listener mayil.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I'm going to call this neat story about how great
stuff you should know listeners are. Oh, I like that
from Portland, Maine. Hey, guys, my wife, daughter and I
all stuff you should know listeners for years. Decided last
minute to buy tickets to the show while on vacation
at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, just a short drive south
of Portland. We had nosebleed seats, naturally because we waited
until just an hour before showtime, and that was more
(45:47):
than cool by us, and we were totally stoked just
to be there, whatever the seats. When we got to
our balcony seats, a friendly fellow named Matt approached us,
said he had three tickets for orchestra seats and asked
if we'd like them. Tickets were intended for friends of
his who were stuck in labor day weekend traffic couldn't
make it to the show. Turns out he had been
scouting the crowd for forty minutes looking for a group
(46:09):
of three, even in listening to the help of the
ushers to find three people together, and we were the
first group that he saw. Brief walked downstairs and there
we were three rows from the stage for the supremely
excellent show about podcast topic red acted. Thanks to Matt
and his friends being stuck in traffic, we went from
not having tickets an hour before showtime to having third
(46:31):
row ten minutes before you guys took stage. We considered
it a little piece of true magic. So while I'm
confident this lengthy setup and telling you the story is
way too long for the air, no, not true, Richard Clark,
the whole family would be forever grateful if you could
give Matt and the Connecticut groundskeeper a huge thank you
from Rich, Susan and Emily in upstate New York for
(46:52):
sharing those seats with us.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
That is fantastic. I love our shows, man.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
It's great. People are so kind. And that is from
Richard Clark, not Dick Clark, but rich Clark.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Oh that's even better. Yeah, Dick Clark's taken.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Thank you for rich Clark for recognizing that too.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Thanks for coming to the show, Rich and bringing the family.
And thank you Matt for being such a cool dude.
That was very nice of you. I'm utterly unsurprised because
our fans are pretty great people. Yes, okay, Well, if
you want to get in touch with us, you can
go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and
you can send us tweet or a Insta post or
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(47:32):
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Speaker 2 (47:46):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey guys, it's Josh Josh Clark. No, not that Josh
Clark you went to high school with. Sorry to get
your hopes up like that. This is Josh Clark from
that podcast you listen to Stuff You Should Know, And
for this week's SYSK Select, I'd chosen our September twenty
nineteen episode on lime disease. This one's pretty fascinating because
it turns out lime disease has a ton of intrigue
(00:23):
associated with it. It started out with a cluster of
weird symptoms of people in Connecticut, and then they finally
figured out it was coming from tics. But the mystery
wasn't over because people started developing chronic lime and at
first the medical community didn't believe they had any disease whatsoever.
They thought it was all in their heads. Well they
were wrong. You can find out about all this and
(00:45):
more in this episode on lime disease.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. This
is Stuff you Should Know the podcast. Yeah, Chuck, I
have a question for you. Yes, you know it kicks
me OFFLME disease.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm so mad at you.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Blame you me for that one. She's like, you should
say this, and I said, you know what, I'm I
should totally say that.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah. This is sort of a follow up to our
July twenty seventh, twenty ten episode Why Ticks Suck In,
which which is sort of a legendary episode because we
falsely promised to send people T shirts if they made
it all the way through the episode. That's right, We're
just kidding. But we still get those requests of wears
my shirt.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yes, that's hilarious. I forgot about that and also get
sued today.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Yeah. Probably. So. Also want to point out and shout
out our former website HowStuffWorks dot com because a couple
of the articles that we use for much of this
episode is from the old HSW website.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Nice, they're holding it down over there.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
They're holding it down and this is real good stuff.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah. So we're talking today about lime disease.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
In particular, not limes.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
No, we should say it's capital l ym disease. And
the reason it's called that is because it's named after
a town which is one of three towns where the
initial outbreak of lime disease that led to this bacterial
infection persistent bacterial infection was first describe medically.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
One of the facts of the show. I think, oh yeah, sure,
who knew it was named after a town, Lime, Connecticut?
I knew did you know that before this?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Sure?
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Did we cover that? And why tik suck?
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
All right, well, you're smarter than me that.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
No, it's not that. I think what got me was
I I heard about people saying, like, no lime disease,
like people take it for granted, but it's actually some
this really mysterious illness. And I'm like, what are you
talking about? So I think I looked into this year's
back and that's what I found out.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
All right, that was all So we're equally smart.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Right exactly, I'm not smarter than you.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
What is smart? It's just like someone happens to know
one thing, someone else knows another. Sure, I say, they
cancel out, we're all smart here you goo.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
I'm glad you pulled that out because I would have
been like, what is smart? I couldn't have come up
with the definition.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
So lime disease, We'll go ahead and hit you with
a couple of stats here. Lime disease in the United
States is more than doubled since nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
That's astounding, it is.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And it has spread too. It used to be very
much localized in kind of the Northeast, sort of mid
Atlantic areas, some in the South, but now you can
get lime disease. And I believe the entire lower forty
eight is that correct.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
There are cases in all forty eight states. Supposedly half
of the counties in the United States now are considered
a high risk for lime disease. And like all of
this happened just in the last like twenty or so years. Yeah,
which is I mean, there's a lot of debate over
the CDC calls lime disease endemic, which is a disease
(04:21):
that has become a like an ongoing part of an
area or region, and some other people are saying, guys,
what we're talking about here is an epidemic. This is
an epidemic, and you should start calling it that because
it will kind of raise the alarm to the next
level or two where it should be. Because this is
a very alarming spread of disease that we're seeing right now,
(04:44):
lime disease is the number one vector borne disease in
the United States. It's way more prevalent than things like
West Nile or chicken gooony or anything like that, but
it's still kind of treated as like up there in
the northeastern US thing, and that's just not the case.
It's spread in every direction except east because it hit
(05:04):
the Atlantic, but everywhere else where. It can spread into
the interior of the United States and up into Canada.
It's starting to.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, and there's also a history continuing to this day
even where lime disease can be overlooked, misdiagnosed, not taken
as seriously by your doctor as it should be, including
what we'll get to later on something called post treatment
lime disease syndrome. And it's all very frustrating if you
(05:34):
have been an individual that has had lime disease. There's
a big community out there of people that are like,
why won't anyone listen to us, Why won't our doctors
take as seriously? And what do we have to do here?
Like do we have to start dropping dead?
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of frustration in that community
because there's a sentiment among the medical establishment that.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
You know, he takes some antiotics.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Exactly, it's easy to cure lime disease. Here's some antibiotics.
You still have persistent symptoms. Those are probably in your head.
We're not going to say they're in your head, but
they're in your head. And the people who are experiencing
these symptoms are like, no, my life has been derailed
by these symptoms, and you guys aren't doing anything about it.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
It's frustrating. I know there's a lot of people out
there that are pretty pretty stoked right now to be
hearing this. Yeah, you know for sure we're advocating for
you guys. Sure, not patting myself on the back, although
I am literally patty like.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
I see you chuck here. That albow is sticking out
pretty far. So.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
Lime disease is a disease. It's an infection caused by
the bacterium boro lea burgdorfrairi wow borg da faery burg
dea fraiari.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
We're gonna get you an apron and call you the
word butcher.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Burgdor fairy work more. And we'll get to why it's
called that in a bit. But if you haven't caught
on by now, it is transmitted through tick bites.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Right, So, a tick, and in particular a nymph stage
of a tick, which is a young adult or juvenile tick,
will transmit this bacteria, the Borellia burgdor fairy, into a human.
And the reason we usually get it from nymphs chuck
is because an adult tick doesn't find humans particularly appetizing,
(07:20):
but a nymph tick will because they're stupid, they don't
know anything yet. So as they're feeding on us. After
somewhere maybe around twenty four to thirty six hours of
feeding this infected tick that has this bacteria in it,
the bacteria will make its way from the mid gut
to the tick saliva and the tick transmit it transmits
it into the human bloodstream, where it just absolutely wreaks
(07:43):
havoc on the human body.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Yeah, and you said something really key there, twenty four
thirty six, forty eight hours later, really really important. They
have to be attached to you for that long, sometimes
even longer to transmit this bacterium. So if you find
a tick on you and you get it off, if
you don't need to sweat lime disease, no, if you
get it off in due time.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Right exactly, If like you see it's still crawling on you.
It's unattached, you don't worry about it at all. But
when it is attached and when it has transmitted the
bacteria what it's transmitted, This be burgdor Ferry is like
really amazing at its job, which is infecting you, giving
you a bacterial infection. It has figured out how to
(08:27):
zoom through the bloodstream but then also take itself out
of the bloodstream by latching onto the walls of your
blood vessels.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, this was crazy about this cellular stuff that once
it's attached to a cell. They said, it's like a slinky.
It doesn't let go. It just like basically reaches out
and grabs the next cell without letting go of the
previous cell and just sort of walks end over end right,
never unattaching.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Itself right exactly. So as it's moving along, it's never
it's not going to get kind of you know, washed
away and the extracellular matrix it's stuck to the cell.
If it wants to be stuck in the cell, it
can do the same thing to the blood vessel walls
to pull itself out of the bloodstream and then go
attack you know, specific parts of the body, So it's
(09:12):
really good at hanging on. That's one thing that makes
it kind of pernicious. And then another thing exactly, it's
basically yeah, it's like the bacteria version of a tick.
I didn't think about that. And then another thing it does, Chuck,
I think this is really really recent research. It can
actually change its protein expression at a much faster rate
(09:33):
than the normal mutation rate for bacteria, something like fifteen
times faster.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, And what that does is that just makes it
really hard for our human immune system to catch up to.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
It, right, because our immune system will produce antibodies based
on the initial infection, but by the time the antibodies
come around, the bacteria may have changed itself so that
the antibodies won't recognize it. They'll just go right past
it because it doesn't it doesn't fit the description that
the antibodies have.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
That's right, And you'll know that something bad is happening
first of all if you find that tick. But if
you get headaches, fever, fatigue is a huge, huge symptom.
But the real telltale is what's called em It's an
expanding skin rash called erythema migrants and it's like it's
(10:25):
that circular pattern. And then we did talk about this
on the Ticks episode. But it's a circular pattern with
what looks like a bull's eye in the center of it.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, and you can take off your butcher's apron now
because you just that was beautiful, put on your chef's
chef's hat.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You're sweating over there.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So that that particular rash, that bullseye rash, that is
like a just an absolute telltale sign that you have
a line boreolis boreliosis infection that only comes around and
like maybe seventy to eighty percent of cases. I think
(11:03):
if every person got that rash, we would not have
this problem with lime disease because it would be caught
very quickly because you get that within usually about a
week or less of getting infected. But it doesn't come
up in all cases. And with some of those other
symptoms like you said, like weakness, headaches, flu like symptoms
(11:26):
like those could be a lot of different other things,
joint pain, and so the lime disease infection goes undiagnosed
or misdiagnosed in a lot of cases, are did for
many many years. It's just now that they're starting to
kind of recognize it or suspect lime when otherwise they
might not have.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
Yeah. I mean literally hundreds of things can be can
have the same symptoms as lime disease. So lime's been
around for a long time. We'll talk about the history
here in a minute, as far as the nineteen seventies
go and official recognition, but it's been around. I believe
the Yale School of Public Health find the bacterium in
(12:06):
ancient North America, like sixty thousand years old before the
arrival of humans. They have an autopsy of a fifty
three hundred year old mummy that had lime disease.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Yeah, you know Utzi the Iceman, remember him?
Speaker 3 (12:24):
I remember Uzzy?
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah. I was disappointed that they referred to him as
a fifty three hundred year old mummy. It's like, no,
it's Utzi the ice everybody knows him, give him his name.
But he had lime disease.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
He did. And there was a German physician named Alfred
Buckwald who described this that em skin rash that we
now call lime disease about one hundred and thirty years ago.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Right, So lime disease has been around a while, but
we are just now seeing a huge again an epidemic
of it, and in a massive spread of it, not
just in North America, but there's also two other kinds
of ticks that transmit two other kinds of lime causing
bacteria in Europe and Asia, and in all three places,
(13:08):
North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, the incidence of
lime diseases picking up at an alarming pace.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
I think we should slow down our pace. Take break. Okay,
all right, we'll come back and we'll talk about Lime
Connecticut right after this. All right, So Lime, Connecticut. Something
(13:54):
is very old hat to you.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Right it for years Lime Old Lime?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
And what was the third town? I don't remember, No,
let's just call it New Lime. It was.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Notice, they're going to be so mad. Their high school
football team is going to go brazik on Old Lime
this year.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
In the nineteen seventies, though, there were a group of
children and adults in these towns in Connecticut that were
having all these weird symptoms swollen knees, skin rashes, headaches,
all this severe fatigue. And it's bad enough these days,
But in the early nineteen seventies, doctors were definitely did
not have this on the radar and were very dismissive
(14:34):
of what was going on in these towns and if
it were not for the work of Judith Minch and
Polly Murray too, just regular moms. Although Polly Murray did
work for the World Health Organization for a while. They
were advocates. They were patient advocates because their families were
getting sick and no one would listen. And they were like,
someone's got to do something. Something's going on here, and
(14:58):
these doctors are not being any help, right, And it
was a big deal. Polly Murray ended up writing a book.
She made it sort of her life's work in nineteen
ninety six, a book called The Widening Circle. And because
of sort of the persistent sexism and science, they were
largely discounted, even though they had a list of thirty
seven individuals they researched on their own, contacted scientists. We
(15:22):
just really need to shout them out. Polly Murray died
just about a month ago at the age of eighty five.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Oh is that right? Yeah, Yeah, she was a persistent
cuss as they call them up in the Yankee States.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
So on the one hand, yes, from the everything I've
read and all the impressions I have. They were very
much dismissed, and it was very much sexist and also
I think because they weren't doctors. But on the other hand,
the doctors who were being presented with these cases were like,
I have no idea what this is, so let's just
pretend it's not real. But luckily those two women in
(15:57):
the groups that they established, they went on and they
contacted Yale Medical School, they contacted the state, and they
really kind of put this on the map. They said,
there is a mysterious epidemic that's going on where you
have a lot of kids who suddenly have juvenile arthritis
out of nowhere. What are you guys going to do
about it? And because of their agitation, this mystery made
(16:19):
its way to the desk or I guess, the microscope
of a guy named Willie Bergdorffer, and he was at
the time the world's foremost authority on what's called Rocky
Mountain spotted fever, which is another tickborn bacterial infection.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
I remember that when I was a kid, that was
a big news item. It was a scary one.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
He was working out in Colorado, and Colorado was ground
zero for Rocky Mountain spotted fever. For a while, which is, yeah,
you do not want to have that. It's a really
bad bacterial infection. But by this time they had done
thanks to the legwork done by the moms and the
patient advocate groups in the Lime, Connecticut, it had been
(17:01):
pretty well established that the common thread between all these people,
besides where they lived and by the way, it was
chuck lyme Old Lime and East HadAM sorry East HadAM
aside from the fact that they all lived in the
same region, was that all of them were almost all
of them were called being bitten by a tick, and
a lot of them had a mysterious rash right before
(17:23):
the symptoms presented. So it came to this guy, Willie
Bergdorffer's microscope because they had said, there's something in the
ticks here that is creating this disease that we haven't
encountered before.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
That's right, and he had already discovered this bacterium called
it How do you how do you pronounce that spirit.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Chat spira keet, spire key, But spira keet is a
type of bacteria, and that's what that's what they all, right,
spirra chet and you just made me think of the
older brother Chet and weird.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Now go make yourself one. But what.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Man? That guy had some good quotes.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Oh yeah, rip what what Bill Paxton when he died
a couple of years ago? Very sad?
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Are you sure I'm thinking of Bill Pullman?
Speaker 3 (18:18):
No, Bill Paxton died. It was so sad because I
had just listened to his uh Mark Maron interview and
he was like, after that episode, I wanted nothing more
than to be Bill Paxton's friend and neighbor. He just
sounded like the best guy and best family man. And
he passed away way too early.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Yeah, really, I did not know about that.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I saw Frailty not too many weeks ago. It's still
pretty good.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Was it the first viewinger?
Speaker 1 (18:42):
No? No, no, I've seen it before.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
But yeah, man, great movie.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Yeah. But he wrote and I believe directed and starred
in it.
Speaker 3 (18:48):
Yeah. It was so good. And I love a good
Powers Booth cast and call.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
For sure it was. It was unusual and surprising.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
But it was perfect, very good, underrated film. Where are we? Oh?
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Yeah, we were talking about Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Willie
Bergdorfer identifying the spiro keet that was causing.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Lime hirakeet right, spira chet What a dumb, dumb.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Yeah. No, remember we established we're all smart.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
He Yeah, So he discovered this, this parakeet, and he
was honored by this discovery and naming that thing after himself.
That's why it has that interesting name.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I get the impression. And he didn't name it after himself.
They named it after him to go on.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, okay, but.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
There's a big difference between him saying this thing's called
the Burgdorferey bacteria and somebody saying we're going to name
this after you.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
No, I totally agree.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Okay, So Burgdorfrey or Burgdorfer. He figures out what is
the basis of lime disease, which is great. That's an
enormous breakthrough. It establishes that yes, it is its own thing,
it's its own disease. And because it was a bacteria,
it's a spier key, which again it's a kind of
a snakelike shaped bacteria specific kind that walks like a slinky.
(20:11):
Because it was a bacterial infection, the medical establishment said, oh,
we got this here. Take some antibiotics, and over the
course of several years, starting in I think the nineties,
is when they really started to say, okay, we can
cure lyme disease, especially if we catch it early on
by a two to four week round of antibiotics. Right,
(20:33):
here you go, and they said, case closed, we're the
medical establishment. Let's go have a party for ourselves.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Yeah, And here's the thing, Like many times that can
take care of the problem. So it's not like they
were just lazy and not doing their work. But I
think they closed the book a little too soon, and
a lot of people do because that oral that round
of oral antibiotics, if you catch it early, it can
really work. But and I think they say, what like
(21:01):
nine times out of ten, if you catch it early,
then that will that will work right there.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
So they're so persistent with that assertion that if you
find a tick on yourself and you live in an
area where lime disease is known to thrive, if you
can't say how long that tick's been on you, they're
probably just going to give you a round of antibiotics portolactically. Yeah.
And again, like you said, in a lot of cases,
(21:28):
and I believe, from what I've read, the vast majority
of cases in early stage lime disease, that round of
antibiotics should work.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
Yeah, And they say that if you and This is
from the American Lime Diesus Foundation quote. If you live
in an endemic area, have symptoms consistent with early lime disease,
and suspect recent exposure to a tick, present your suspicion
to your doctor so that he or she may make
a more informed diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
So show up to your doctor and say, yeah, madam,
I would love to present my suspicions to you. Please
sit down.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Well, they're saying sort of, still, you still sort of
need to be your own advocate because it is so
hard to diagnose. Still, because if you're going on symptoms alone,
like we said, there are hundreds of things that share
those symptoms and lime disease may not be the first
thing they think of.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
That's a huge problem with lime disease. Another huge problem
is that the test we use to test for lime
disease doesn't actually test for the b burgdorfree bacteria. It
tests for the antibodies that should be present in your
bloodstream if you have a bacterial infection, not even specific
to that one, but a bacterial infection. The problem is
(22:40):
it takes days, if not maybe a week or two
before your body mounts an effective immune response against this infection.
So if you find a tick and they give you
a test, say within the first couple of days, it's
going to come back negative. Even though you very much
have a Burgdor free infection, it's going to come negative
(23:00):
because it's the antibodies haven't been created yet. The other
part of the problem is even if you take a
blood test that tests directly for the Burgdor free bacterium,
it moves out of the blood stream really easily and
within its several days. So there's a very brief window
of time where you can directly test for the Burgdor
(23:21):
free bacteria and find it in a simple blood test.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, you can also get false positives, and they're advocating
now for two tiered testing for confirmation of the diagnosis.
So if you get that first positive test sometimes now
you'll get a different test, a Western block test, right,
that's gonna really get more specific to that antibody, not
just the general antibodies.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Right. So part of the other problem is the reason
a lot of patient activists and patient advocate groups say no, doctors,
you're wrong, like this is not good enough, is that
there's a sneaking suspicion among people who have what's called
chronic lime or post treatment lime disease syndrome is that
(24:07):
the round of antibiotics, the two to four week round
of antibiotics that seemingly cured the lime disease symptoms, that
you had actually failed to fully knock out the bacteria
that created this infection, that created this lime disease in
the first place, that it just burrowed further into your body.
And because the medical establishment said we got it, it's fine,
(24:31):
these antibiotics cured it and didn't go deeper, that bacterial
infection is allowed to fester and then present in worse
ways later.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, and it's a really big deal because you know
what will happen is they'll say, you're cured. We gave
these antibiotics. They worked. But weeks and months and even
years later, when people have persistent fatigue and muscle aches
and headaches and you know, like your knee joints hurt,
they said, like a brain full can happen. And these
(25:01):
are all things that are I don't want to say generic,
but if you walk into your doctor and say I
feel like I'm fuzzy and I have a brain fog
and get headaches and I'm tired, it's sort of a
wide it's hard to pinpoint what's going on. Sure, and
they think you're cured of the lime disease. So that's
where some of the more dismissive, at least from the
(25:25):
lime disease community. They're saying, like, I have this chronic issue,
and they're saying, but no, there's no such thing as
a chronic issue. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Well, they're also saying like, look, we gave you a
test for lime disease and you came back negative. Right
you know, we know you had it before we tested you.
We came back positive, We treat you with antibiotics. Now
we've tested you again and it's coming back negative. You
don't have lime disease anymore. So there's a huge debate
whether they're the antibiotic course is not enough and that
(25:54):
the lime disease is persisting elsewhere in the body, and
that maybe it's changed its form so that it won't
show up on the tests like it should, or there's
remnants of it. I saw one article that suggested that
the cell wall from the spiro keat the brigdor free
spiro keet can remain even after the thing's dead and
(26:15):
persistent joint tissue and cause an immune response there, which
would explain this long term arthritis is like a post
treatment line disease syndrome symptom. Or is it that it
converts into an entirely different disease, like an autoimmune disorder.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, some people think that it could trigger an autoimmune
response and the infection's gone, and this is what's happening
later on. Is you have this autoimmune response, it can
lead to other things like rheumatic heart disease. I think
we do we cover Keon Bear syndrome or just talk
about it in different episodes.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
We've talked about it, and I think if I remember
correctly as Gia Barre.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
GiB, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Yeah, we could both be wearing the apron for this
one though.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
Well, we'll split it up. I get the doer half.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
All right, I get the top half. I'm porky pigging
it all right.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
I'm going to just cover my bits down there. But
regardless of what's happening, what people know is is that
they don't feel right, and it's extremely frustrating to feel
these symptoms months and years later and not be taken
seriously in a doctor's office.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, so a lot of people are saying that these
this course of antimbiotics shouldn't be two to four weeks,
it should be many months, because you really need to
get all of the spiral keet out of there or
else it's going to persist and you're going to have
big problems. And then the medical establishment is saying, like
what you're talking about doesn't even exist. So there's a
lot of frustration that you're saying a big disconnect, and
(27:50):
this is something that is probably going to keep playing out,
although it seems like it may be on its way
out because of the epidemic proportions line is taking now
in the United States.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Yeah, I mean, the statistics are mounting up such that
it can't be ignored any longer. Not that it was ignored,
but you know that's probably a harsh statement, but it's
being taken away more seriously now.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, I saw something like there's an expectation that there's
going to be something like three hundred to four hundred
thousand new cases of lime disease in the United States alone,
and that ten to twenty percent of those patients will
end up with chronic lime disease.
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Yeah. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time
hiking around the woods with my dogs and have pulled
plenty of ticks off of them and plenty of ticks
off of myself. And I have fatigue a lot because
I have a four year old and every now and
then I'm like, do I have lime disease?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Well? Probably not, And here's why.
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Well, I've never had the bulls eye. First of all, okay,
that's a big one.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
But also the ticks you pull off of your dog,
those are dog ticks. They do not transmit lime. It's
specifically the long late or black legged tick, which is
a type of deer tick.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Well, but here's the thing. There are plenty of deer
ticks in the woods. Are you saying that they if
they would not latch onto a dog, and they'd be.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Like, ooh, no, I don't know. I don't know, because
there's deer ticks all over the woods. Sure, there definitely are.
I don't know if deer ticks will latch onto a dog.
It's entirely possible they won't, since there's such a differentiation
between dog ticks and deer ticks. But I do know
that dog ticks don't transmit lime.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Well, I think we should talk about my favorite thing
from the ticks episode, And this is one I will
lay on people from time to time is remember how
ticks attach themselves. Sure, they just hang out on blades
of grass and things and just snap their little claws constantly,
just waiting for something to pass by.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Yet they think can latch onto, right, they sense the
co two of the mammal that's walking past.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
So interesting and chuck.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
One thing I read is that somehow the lime lime
infected ticks because they're infect of themselves. Lime resides as
in like small mammals and rodents as a reservoir. Yeah,
they are infected, but they don't have symptoms. Ticks get
infected with this stuff and they're just passing it along.
It's not like they're the ultimate source of lime disease.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
No, ticks are misunderstood.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
They're really great, right, But from what I saw, the
ticks that are infected with the lime bacteria are actually
better at finding hosts than non infected ticks. Like it
somehow enables them to be better parasites. It's interesting.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, that sounds familiar. Did we cover that or do
I just know that?
Speaker 1 (30:36):
Because I don't, I don't remember, but I do I
remember you talking about in the Tics episode about how
they wave their arms in the air when somebody passed by,
and I remember one of our listeners made some art
of that. We got to find it.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
That's right. And from snapping their little fingers on a
blade of grass to my dog's but to my scrotum,
it's quite a to ride.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
It's a wild ride.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
And then to Emily eventually plucking that thing out for me,
that's nice, gotta that's what marriage is all about, folks.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, you just have your forearm thrust across your eyes.
You're like, get it out, get it out.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Uh. So let's take another break. Okay, we'll talk a
little bit about prevention and then a little bit about
some very recent interesting wacky things going on in Congress
about lime disease as a bio weapon.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Okay, okay, Chuck, you talked about prevention. How do you
(31:59):
keep from having to have a tick pulled from your crotch?
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Don't ever go into mother Nature. Just stay in your
mid century modern home with tiled floors, and don't go
into the woods. Sounds delicious, No, I love the woods.
You love the woods? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Yeah, I love watching the Woods on television.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Yeah, from your midcentury house.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
No, I do. I love the woods myself.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
Yeah, I'm just kidding, get in the woods, but they
recommend things like deet. I don't use that stuff on
my own body, but some people will say put that
all over your body and put it on your clothes,
and put it on your socks and shoes and.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Just walk around spring a cloud of it around you
constantly while you're in the woods.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
What I do is I just check for ticks.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, a good thing to do, Seriously, it looks super dorky,
but what do you care is to tuck your pant
legs into your socks. Yeah, sure, when and then when
you come out, like wear light colors too, because you
can see the ticks a lot more easily. And then
when you when you come out of the woods, take
your clothes off and take a shower as soon as
(33:05):
you can, and just inspect yourself. Inspect you're growing your armpits,
your scalp. Part of the problem with lime disease, though,
is remember you get it from TIMPs? Do you get
it from ticks in the nymph stage which are really
really small. So you've got to check really really well
to see if you have that tick on you.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, and just while you're at it, take off the
adult tics as well. Yeah, don't don't just leave those
and check your dogs. You know, you check your dogs
under their haunches, like on the armpit of their legs
whatever that's called their leg pits. Check behind their ears,
check under their collars, because ticks are trying to you know,
they're not going to hang out just like on the
(33:46):
top of their back. They may start there, but they're
going to try and find a place that's dark and
warm and out of view.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Yeah. I don't mean to say you can't get lime
disease from an adult chuck. It's just that the nymphs
are far more likely to eat on a human than
an adult is. But a lime infected adult tick will
transmit sure lyn to you too.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
For sure, A very important distinction. So now we move
on to the US Congress. Very recently, about a month ago,
end of July. I think, yeah, there was a US
House rep named Chris Smith, a Republican out of New Jersey,
who introduced legislation that said, hey, Department of Defense, you
should review these claims that I'm seeing that our own
(34:32):
Pentagon researched using tics to spread lime disease as a
bioweapon in the mid twentieth century. I'm reading a lot
about this in books and articles that we did research
on Plumb Island and and other insects too, not just ticks,
of turning them into bioweapons, and this thing passed. And
a lot of this comes from a book written by
(34:55):
Chris Newby called Bitten Colon The Secret History of Lime
Disease and Biological Weapons.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
And this book, like I think Chris Smith, the representative
from New Jersey said, like, this book really inspired me
to take up this legislation. But in the book, Newby
basically says, the government at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and on
Plum Island, New York, before it was turned into an
animal disease research center, we're doing.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
It was an insect disease research center before that, I guess.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
They were looking into well, they definitely were doing biowarfare
research there.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
Early early nineteen fifties, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And then Fort Dietrich for however long if they're not
still doing it now, But they were apparently looking into
ticks as delivery systems for biological weapons.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
I couldn't find that that is actually verified, but I
find that highly believable. But what Newby is saying is
they were doing that research and then the way we
got line diseases, whatever research they were coming up with, escaped,
say a tick attached to a bird that flew off
of Plumb Island and landed in the area around Lyme, Connecticut,
(36:10):
and these ticks got off and they started to breed
and they became endemic in this area. And that's where
lime disease came from. There was actually a biological weapon
that was produced and then inadvertently, probably not purposefully released
into the larger population in the northeast.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah. So here's my question. I haven't read the book,
but are they saying that that we created lime disease
or that we just weaponized it, because those are two
very different things.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah. I don't know what she's saying either, and I
think she stopped short of saying that, but that it's
implied that if you put two and two together, the
government was looking into biological warfare and they were talking about,
you know, using ticks at some point, and you know,
it's really close to this ground zero of where the
(37:05):
tick epidemic began. You put two and two together, that's
the impression I have is that she didn't actually come
out and say it, but that she lets the readers
surmise for themselves, which is the problem.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Well, I mean, that's very easy to disprove if she's
actually claiming that they created lime disease, because we just
got through saying it was in who was the Mummy Utsi?
It was in Utsi years ago over in the Alps. Well, true,
but it also in the United States. I mean, it
(37:38):
came around in the We first discovered it that in
nineteen seventies, and like several different places. It wasn't just
lime Connecticut. They found it in California, right, And you
can't just that just it doesn't add up that it
would be popping up in all these random places if
it escaped from Long Island Sound in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Right, which I think somebody who subscribed to this conspiracy
theory and is very much what it is, is a
conspiracy theory that well, then the release wasn't purpose or accidental.
It was purposeful that they spread it around the northeast
California and then Spooner, Wisconsin, which supposedly is the actual
place where the first case of lime disease was described
(38:16):
in the United States in nineteen sixty nine. Yeah, about
six years before this cluster of juvenile arthritis cases popped
up in old Lime Lime in East HadAM.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Well, it's a very bad idea if that's what went on,
because you have to depend on a lot of things,
which is A these tics definitely finding their way to
the enemy. B they attached to the enemy successfully and
transmit the disease. And then what does it transmit? A
very slow acting disease that will give people headaches and
(38:51):
fatigue over the course of a long time.
Speaker 1 (38:54):
Right, that also produces a one of a kind, telltale rash,
Right that tells you, supposedly in plenty of time that
you have this this disease that needs to be treated
with a simple course of oral antibiotics.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah, and it has to be probably in the country.
They don't thrive well in the city, right, So it's
just it doesn't make a good biological weapon.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
No. And then again people who subscribed as conspiracy theory say, well,
they can't all be winners. But maybe it was just
something they were experimenting with and it wasn't very good.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Trust me. I mean, we've done enough research on stuff
our American government used to do and continue to do that.
It's not the most outlandish thing in the world.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
No, it's not. And that's also why Chris Smith, the
representative from New Jersey, shouldn't just be dismissed out of
hand because it's entirely plausible. It's yeah, it's not just
a complete wacko idea.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Right.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
The other reason Christmis shouldn't just be dismissed out of
hand is because he is a true lime warrior. He
introduced other legislation called the Tick Act, and of course
he had to make tick an achronism, that an acronym,
not a an acronism, stand for the Ticks Colon, Identify
Control and Knockout Act. He was really grasping like a
(40:08):
tick on a blade of grass with that one.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
But the point is, but knockout's not one word unless
you use it as knockout.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Well, that's what he's saying, I guess, because the work
goes act. But it would create an additional one hundred
and eighty million dollars in federal funding for lime disease research,
sorely needed.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
Right now, that's awesome. I didn't know you was such
an advocate. That's good.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
He really is. He hates lime disease like like a lot.
Speaker 3 (40:37):
I was about to say something, but I wish I.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Could take a pill that would bulk up my analogy
region in my brain.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
Oh, your analogies are great.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
What were you going to say? I want to know
we can beep it off.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
And I was going to get political. I was going
to say, he hates ticks like he hates Okay, can
we leave that and bleep it. I don't know, we'll
find out, all right.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
So the whole idea that it's a bioweapon almost certainly
not the case, right, but it makes for good press.
I mean, like if you look up like lyme disease
and bioweapon. There is a lot of recent articles written
on it. Just because a member of Congress introduced this legislation.
What a lot of people are saying is, look, it
(41:19):
makes sense, like this conspiracy theory that people would go
to that. But on at the same time, there's another
really great explanation for it, and it's climate change that
this whole thing came about in the seventies, because we're
starting to see what was called the first epidemic from
(41:40):
climate change, and there's this really great article on Aon,
which is a great website by Mary Beth Pfeiffer spells
it like Michelle Pfiffer with the p called ticks Rising,
and she's an investigative reporter of science journalists who really
went to a lot of trouble to explain how climate
change has created a new world for ticks and we
(42:03):
are now living in it.
Speaker 3 (42:05):
Yeah, I mean, in twenty fourteen, the EPA actually started
to use four new indicators about what's going on with
climate change and the impact, and one of them was
the spread of lime disease. So like the EPA officially
uses that as a factor in an indicator in determining
the impact of climate change now right.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And so the whole basis of this idea is that
because of warmer weather, ticks are being killed off in
far fewer numbers from over the winter, so they're surviving
longer as it gets warmer and warmer, higher and higher
up their range is spreading rather rapidly. Oh yeah, and
wherever these tics go, lime disease is game to go
(42:48):
with them. So the spread of lime disease is increasing
as the spread of ticks is increasing too, And ticks
have gotten totally out of hand in some areas. In
that same Aon article, well, Mary Beth Pfeiffer was talking
about how moose are dying in their thousands in like
Wisconsin and the Dakotas because they're being bled to death
(43:12):
by one hundred thousand ticks at once.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's amazing that.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
Never happened before. And now all of a sudden, it's
kind of becoming routine because the ticks aren't dying off
in the winter like they're supposed to. And again it's
because of climate change. And then in the Northeast, Chuck,
one of the reasons why there's been this explosion of
ticks is because there's been an explosion of deer to
support the tick population.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Sure, back in the day, there were things like mountain lions,
and there were predators that would help control the deer population. Yeah, wolves, wolves.
They are even suggesting reintroducing wolves to help control the
deer population.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Oh yeah, you can bet that's going to happen.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
No really, no, I mean do you think so? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (43:54):
Totally. Like if three hundred thousand people a year are
coming down with lime in the United States, they're going
to are reintroducing wolves to combat if it has even
a half of a chance.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'd be interested to see if that happens for sure,
because humans are going to want to hunt those wolves.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, you know, it just brings it out in us
for some reason. Huh.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
Well, I mean they hunted the mountain lions, right.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
But I think that's the idea of oh wait a minute,
really weird and circuit as bad things happen when we
overhunt mountain lions and wolves, maybe when we reintroduce them,
we won't have to, you know, or we won't follow
that impulse. We'll just let nature take its course.
Speaker 3 (44:38):
Right.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Who knows you got anything else? Man?
Speaker 3 (44:41):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
So there's a solution around antibiotics and some wolves, and
that'll cure what ails us.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
Yeah, advocate for yourself still, people, sure, and the.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Wolves be persistent. That's good advice for everything. Chuck agreed. Everything.
There's certainly cases where persistence is not a good idea,
But you.
Speaker 3 (45:03):
Know what I'm saying, right, I do know.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Okay. If you want to know more about lyme disease,
go check out all of the articles they are to read.
And again, go check out the aon article by Mary
Beth fight for It's really interesting and since I said
it's interesting, that means it's time for listener mayil.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I'm going to call this neat story about how great
stuff you should know listeners are. Oh, I like that
from Portland, Maine. Hey, guys, my wife, daughter and I
all stuff you should know listeners for years. Decided last
minute to buy tickets to the show while on vacation
at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, just a short drive south
of Portland. We had nosebleed seats, naturally because we waited
until just an hour before showtime, and that was more
(45:47):
than cool by us, and we were totally stoked just
to be there, whatever the seats. When we got to
our balcony seats, a friendly fellow named Matt approached us,
said he had three tickets for orchestra seats and asked
if we'd like them. Tickets were intended for friends of
his who were stuck in labor day weekend traffic couldn't
make it to the show. Turns out he had been
scouting the crowd for forty minutes looking for a group
(46:09):
of three, even in listening to the help of the
ushers to find three people together, and we were the
first group that he saw. Brief walked downstairs and there
we were three rows from the stage for the supremely
excellent show about podcast topic red acted. Thanks to Matt
and his friends being stuck in traffic, we went from
not having tickets an hour before showtime to having third
(46:31):
row ten minutes before you guys took stage. We considered
it a little piece of true magic. So while I'm
confident this lengthy setup and telling you the story is
way too long for the air, no, not true, Richard Clark,
the whole family would be forever grateful if you could
give Matt and the Connecticut groundskeeper a huge thank you
from Rich, Susan and Emily in upstate New York for
(46:52):
sharing those seats with us.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
That is fantastic. I love our shows, man.
Speaker 3 (46:56):
It's great. People are so kind. And that is from
Richard Clark, not Dick Clark, but rich Clark.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Oh that's even better. Yeah, Dick Clark's taken.
Speaker 3 (47:05):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Thank you for rich Clark for recognizing that too.
Speaker 3 (47:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Thanks for coming to the show, Rich and bringing the family.
And thank you Matt for being such a cool dude.
That was very nice of you. I'm utterly unsurprised because
our fans are pretty great people. Yes, okay, Well, if
you want to get in touch with us, you can
go on to stuff you Should Know dot com and
you can send us tweet or a Insta post or
a comment or what have you, that kind of thing
(47:32):
because all of our social links are there. Or you
can just do it the old fashioned way and send
an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,
and send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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