Lyme disease is only a part of it. It's a detailed history of Plum Island, and the scientists who ran it, and all the unbelievable safety lapses there. It's chilling to read.

And yes, they did experiment on tick colonies there. And yes, deer swam back and forth between the island and the sound and connecticut, and birds did too, and some employees apparently even reported seeing deer come into the animal pens--the animal pens were kept outside, and these were animals they were inoculating with viruses etc.

Even anthrax was apparently there--once classified as "N", that name now declassified.

It's been what you'd call a Level 3 plus--some of the pathogens experimented on were very borderline, close to lethal Level 4.

During a hurricane and blackout on the island (they don't have power backup!) one employee was exposed to some kind of virus and got very ill, and Plum Island/USDA refused to release his baseline blood labwork (taken when he started working) to his doctors, and after an outcry, still released only a part of it. So obvioulsy they knew what virus he'd been infected with but didn't care, I suppose they deemed it "national security." He was sick for a long time and still has weird relapses.

It's really a page turner.

You can have very little doubt after reading it what caused the outbreak of lyme in Old Lyme, and I still believe, they experimented on putting a soup of bugs in the ticks, and yes, the ticks sallied forth onto Long Island and into Connecticut via birds and deer. In fact, Plum Island is apparently a major migratory stop for many birds, and a favorite spot for birdwatchers.

There is chilling stuff in there about gunk being dumped into the water surrounding the island--and not decontaminated (bio and chemical)

He's also right, it's a ticking time bomb. Thank God they haven't upgraded it to Level 4. As concerned citizens point out, one hurricane--bad weather--and we could have a disaster.

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
Every person on lymenet owes their suffering to those who ran Plum Island, in my opinion, and to the lack of safety measurs.

---

Borrelia obviously was not invented at Plum Island. But experimented on and probably weaponized, yes. Thus the level of illness of those on this newsgroup, where lives are destroyed. Not just a little bit of arthritis.

Read the book. Oh yes, he also points out that lone star ticks somehow migrated up to Connecticut/Long Island from Texas...another "mystery".

I agree, good read!

Is there sufficent evidence to back-up the notion of lyme--as we know it here in the U.S, as being a much more difficult disease to Dx and treat due to Plum Island--then, say, it's European counter part?

Do you *need* objective, or subjective evidence?

For there is a gret divide between the two--scientifically speaking

Consider the great *fact*---that chronic lyme is still (to the steere clan---and keep in mind--he still has every one's ear on the subject of B.B infections)a subjective observation

Why?

Thank the Dearborn criteria for that one
And the fact that it's a clinical DX--always room for error on that issue--per the nay- sayers

I had no intentions of starting a debate about "scientific method" or medical research---this is just offered *up* as a quick example

And ,we know alot of my statements are based on *Political agenda--Not scientific need*, such as Steere--and his criteria....and the damage caused by such

That is why...If *they* have anything to do with it---we may never know the hard-core facts

But--just assume for the moment, we know borrelia infections have been around for quite some time---Germans have papers dating back to the late 1800's about the disease

AND---another *issue* being largely *ignored* on american soil---the fact that the Germans have always felt that it was a
RELAPSING FEVER!!!!!!!!

So, can it be possiable--that there are strains that are truly *found in nature--unaltered*, AND, those that are a by-product of human *tinkering* (Nice word for bio-weaponizing)AND, those that are a "mutation" of the two

Along with other strains--such as those brought in by europeans, asians--and such, and pasted on sexually, and genetically

Also importation of animals--the list can and does----go on and on..................

Modern "lyme" disease is a soup of intracellular pathogens spread by ticks. Look at bartonella, normally a self-limiting cat-scratch fever that requires no antibiotics. Ever wonder why bartonella from a tick, or babesia, or even lyme, is so resistant and requires such heavy duty arsenal?

Our bioweapons program, pieces of it anyway, are out in the open--there's a book on weaponizing brucella, and we finally declassified some of the anthrax info. It's not even a small stretch of the imagination to understand that if Plum Island had ticks, vectors, and one of the guy who ran it, Breeze, was into bioweapons and has since moved on to bigger game in Washington, but hired a former bioweapons guy to follow up in his stead, what happened there.

I'm in the middle of the book now and can offer these tidbits:

The former lab director, Dr. Jerry Callis, openly states that they experimented with ticks (but never outside of containment....LOL!). They had a tick colony and fed them on viruses.
He has had Lyme disease 3 times, but.................''not now or ever had we anything to do with Lyme disease''.....

Somehow I'm not comforted by the notion that a Nazi was hired to run the lab in the beginning.

Other issues discussed are the destruction of parts of the agricultural economy of Long Island - ducks, oysters.....a dozen horses killed by West Nile before the first human case.

OK.....and I'm only a third of the way through the book!

I really think it's a must read!

sounds like a great read. thanks jen.

We dug up as many documents as we could in our state archives, but after 1977, everything was either shredded or destroyed in an "accidental" overnight fire at the prison headquarters during an on-going investigation in the mid-1990s.

One of the citizen investigators had life threats and what we consider to have been a very serious attempt on his/her life. (I'm preserving anonymity here by deliberately making the pronoun non-gender specific.) This person was incapacitated by a sprayed toxin and was hospitalized, with health consequences still now, 10 years later.

Other local area investigators had their phones tapped on several occasions. Folks got jittery, but didn't stop investigating -- until the trail ran cold.

There was enough evidence to convince us that the outbreak of ALS, with over 2 dozen deaths in a community of only 33,000 population, was related to either the human medical experiments conducted on our state prisoners by a Nobel laureate who spent 3 years here on site, incognitus, or else to the Top Secret animal experiments carried out on the animals kept by the prison unit for medical research.

And now, we've got a new Level 4 facility on Galveston Island -- where we have hurricanes. That's because the planners were clever enough to sneak it past a state committee rather than to bring it before the full state legislature. It passed because there was very little publicity given to it until after it was too late to stop it.

I regret that the last couple of weeks have been so busy and hectic for me that I'm still only on the first or second chapter of the book. Usually, I would have read the entire book within just the first day or two after obtaining it.

I've seen enough official government documents and medical journal articles acknowledging cooperation with the military to know that these stories of BW research are indeed well grounded and true -- even if many pertinent documents have been classified, if not "accidentally" destroyed.

That was a GREAT synopsis. I just bought the book and have only read the first few pages but as an infrequent reader (I'm low on comprehension and I wonder why, du-uh)I can say just a few pages in and I'm HOOKED.

You helped me straighten out what not to expect.

Anyone who has seen my copy at work and read the inside cover immediately asks "science fiction?" When I say no they are shocked. I believe this book will get feet and start walking and then running.

The only think I am disappointed about (nobody's fault) is that the other reaction people around here (Florida) have is "Thank God I don't live in NY". They don't comprehend the transmitability of this disease, they don't think of birds flying S with an average of 2-4 ticks and as usual, they don't think it will ever happen to them. Worse, some of them are sick with "fibromyalgia" and don't realize it HAS already happened to them.

So, I say Sianara Plum Island

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
.
".........
Lyme disease is only a part of it. It's a detailed history of Plum Island, and the scientists who ran it, and all the unbelievable safety lapses there. It's chilling to read.
Even anthrax was apparently there--once classified as "N", that name now declassified.
It's been what you'd call a Level 3 plus--some of the pathogens experimented on were very borderline, close to lethal Level 4.
During a hurricane and blackout on the island (they don't have power backup!) one employee was exposed to some kind of virus and got very ill, and Plum Island/USDA refused to release his baseline blood labwork (taken when he started working) to his doctors, and after an outcry, still released only a part of it. So obvioulsy they knew what virus he'd been infected with but didn't care, I suppose they deemed it "national security." He was sick for a long time and still has weird relapses......
You can have very little doubt after reading it what caused the outbreak of lyme in Old Lyme, and I still believe, they experimented on putting a soup of bugs in the ticks, and yes, the ticks sallied forth onto Long Island and into Connecticut via birds and deer. In fact, Plum Island is apparently a major migratory stop for many birds, and a favorite spot for birdwatchers.
"........."
He's also right, it's a ticking time bomb. Thank God they haven't upgraded it to Level ......"
"....." It's about the unbelievable carelessness and sloppiness. Every person on lymenet owes their suffering to those who ran Plum Island, in my opinion, and to the lack of safety measurs.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
Tx Lyme MOm, if you want to email me privately I can put you in touch with the publicist and she can pass along your thoughts.

---

I'll have to get in touch with my colleague who spearheaded this. We did our utmost to bring this to the light of day, to no avail. Long story. Very long story. Very, very long story.

I'll pass this idea along and if s/he is agreeable with the idea, then I'll get in touch with you.

There's a lot I simply cannot post here openly, for obvious reasons of course. So, I'll leave the ultimate decision on this up to him/her/them.

I'm confident that whatever s/he/they decide will be for the greater good, and not based on cowardice or anyting like that, because there's quite a lot of background info about why or why not to do something like this at this point in time.

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
YOu know what would be really interesting, Curley? To look at other endemic areas and see if they are on the major migratory routes of birds.
There may be various requirements--I know ticks spread along rivers and water faster than dry land.

---

Be sure to pick up a copy of "Lyme Disease and the SS Elbrus" by Rachel Verdon and look at the map in the frontispiece of the book. That tells the whole story right there. It shows where the SS Elbrus docked and then there's another map overlaid which shows the migratory flight path of birds. Bingo.

The Great Lakes area is the only area where the Elbrus didn't dock, but the Russian fur trade was shipped down the St. Lawrence into the Great Lakes area, so that little known fact explains the high endemnicity of that area.

As for why the Texas-Lousisiana area isn't found to be as highly endemic, it's probably just that other factors come into play to limit the spread of the ticks. For one thing, Texans like sport hunting, so the "Bambis" around here aren't as protected down in this part of the country, where every pickup truck has a shotgun rack in the rear window.

I would imagine that other factors of land usage come into play also which has limited the rapid spread of the infected ticks. Only 1%-2% of the ticks in our state are infected with Borrelia.

Also, our Southern variant of Borrelia doesn't seem to have as rapid an onset of debilitating neurological symptoms as the "Yankee strains" of Bb seem to do. We have a lot more fibromyalgia and CFIDS patients who don't know they have LD. The neuro symptoms don't seem to hit until many years later, and by then, the victims are conned into accepting other diagnoses instead. Very few patients are informed enough to want to seek to be tested for LD.

When the cases aren't reported, then we don't qualify as being an endemic area. Our TDH won't report the cases that our LLMDs are diagnosing. So much for statistics.

Like voting. It doesn't matter so much who votes for whom; what matters is who counts the votes. Same thing with epidemiology. It all depends on who does the counting when it comes to the results of epidemiological surveys of ANYthing, whether LD or anything else.

So, discounting the fact that the TX-LA area doesn't qualify as a recognized "endemic" area, according to the statisticians, we have a very high percentage of CFIDS patients who test positive for LD if/when tested.

I have been nervous to read to be honest, as I read the back and it spooked me. I read the HOT Zone from this guy and it freaked me out and I didn't even have ebola like I do lyme. So I know his work, so this makes me nervous, but I will read it and torture myself.

I ordered it right away and was very excited, I just need more time for the whole lyme thing to sink in as I have a hard time with the reallity of this situaiton.

Yes, TXLymeMom, I think the flight pattern of migratory birds is on the inside cover of the SS Elbrus book.

I also think you would have an easier time finding out what it would be like for an investigation in Texas from Dr. Garth Nicholson. He might be able to tell you what you'd be up against....and why.

Maybe we have reached a time where enough of what was considered "business as usual" is no longer acceptable.

With the Freedom Of Information Act, alot has been opened up.

Whistleblowers are being noticed, validated and change is coming.

Yes, still dangerous....but look at the consequences of keeping quiet!

One of the other sad things in the book was that editors were told by local businesses around Long Island & Connecticut, One more lyme disease story and I'm pulling my advertising, because it'll ruin business.

You know how much a summer house rents for in the Hamptons? SOmetimes $10,000/month or more. There has been all kinds of collusion from so many arenas. I guess this is not a new story. Even at Los Alamos, they dumped radioactive waste in the canyons for 60 years and then set a "controlled burn" in spite of a wind advisory warning that came in a few hours ahead of time. I sometimes wonder about our species.

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
Strength, if you're truly interested, ask your library to get it, and read it. Or spend 20 bucks, and read it. Rather than posing open ended questions. It's a very detailed and appalling read. Otherwise, no offense intended, but what are you contributing to this discussion, and I certainly am not on here to go back to the book and quote detailed passages.

---

I'm not asking you to quote the book, I'm feeling out your blanket statement saying we all owe our ilness to the Old Lyme outbreak which supposedly was caused by Plum Island. Lyme and MS have been documented for around for 100 and 200 years, respectively, so I wanted you to back up your statement.

I'm contributing an alternative viewpoint.

Should I only post closed-ended questions? Yes? No? (kidding around, please don't take offense)

As far as plum island. If they put these animals outside with tested desease's of any kind and any tick was over there bit the animal with what ever thing that animal had in it system then with the already infected lyme tick picked that up and away we go.

NOW as far as it not being in OHIO as bad as other states maybe not at one time. But if we didnt have to go out of state for treatment there would be a whole lot of documented lyme. i think it has already moved from the east over here to us. Were just not getting reconginzed.

Even in my county they say oh we tested and have found no ticks with lyme. And i say lucky me and lucky the others who found the one little buggar who did give us lyme.

I guess the whole state of ohio and docs included will have to get ill with it before anyone will take it serious.

NOW there was a conversation today my husband had with another person who knows two nurses up north its close to cleveland and they told this person that lyme is bad stuff and there is NO Cure. hum very interesting.

graneet

As he makes abundantly clear in the book, it was an outbreak in old Lyme...not naturally occuring. This may amuse some, but it never occured to me that deer could swim, even though as my hair colorist said today, how do you think the deer get to Fire Island? So the deer were swimming back and forth from Plum Island to Long Island and Connecticut. The birds were landing in the animal pens and all around, etc. Let's say, since every deer can carry 1000 ticks, one deer brought over 1000 infected ticks, and hung out in Lyme, CT...

What I am saying is, nobody (me included) remembers lyme when we were growing up. It seemed to start here in the mid-late 70's. And it is extremely virulent in some cases--most on this list have a soup of infections from the tick, and a hard time getting over them, requiring long-term multiple antibiotics and antimalarials. It's my own opinion that these bugs were bioweaponized, and that the suffering from tickborne diseases today in this country is due to sloppy safety standards at bioweapons labs, Plum Island being one of them, probably Ft. Detrick another but who knows. The appalling part of this book is how sloppy they were in so many ways, and how indifferent they were to citations and fines.

New Scientist article out Feb 26:

Superflu is being brewed in the lab


17:42 26 February 04

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

After the worldwide alarm triggered by 2003's SARS outbreak, it might seem reckless to set about creating a potentially far more devastating virus in the lab. But that is what is being attempted by some researchers, who argue that the dangers of doing nothing are even greater.

We already know that the H5N1 bird flu virus ravaging poultry farms in Asia can be lethal on the rare occasions when it infects people. Now a team is tinkering with its genes to see if it can turn into a strain capable of spreading from human to human. If they manage this, they will have created a virus that could kill tens of millions if it got out of the lab.

Many researchers say experiments like this are needed to answer crucial questions. Why can a few animal flu viruses infect humans? What makes the viruses deadly? And what changes, if any, would enable them to spread from person to person and cause pandemics that might prove far worse than that of 1918? Once we know this, they argue, we will be better prepared for whatever nature throws at us.

Others disagree. It is not clear how much we can learn from such work, they argue. And they point out that it is already possible to create a vaccine by other means. The work is simply too dangerous, they say.

"I'm getting bombarded from both sides," says Ronald Atlas, head of the Center for Deterrence of Biowarfare and Bioterrorism at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "Some say that this sort of research is dangerous because of the risk of the virus escaping or being using in bioterrorism, and others that it's good science."

Rodents and monkeys

Some researchers refuse to discuss their plans. But Jacqueline Katz at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, told New Scientist her team is already tweaking the genes of the H5N1 bird flu virus that killed several people in Hong Kong in 1997, and those of the human flu virus H3N2.

She is testing the ability of the new viruses to spread by air and cause disease in ferrets, whose susceptibility to flu appears to be remarkably similar to ours.

Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the Netherlands plans to test altered viruses on rodents and macaque monkeys. Other groups are also considering similar experiments, he says.

If such work were to show that H5N1 could cause a human pandemic, everything that is happening in Asia would be even more alarming, Osterhaus argues. If, on the other hand, it failed to transform H5N1 into a highly contagious human virus, we could relax. "It becomes a veterinary health problem, not a public health problem. That would be an enormous relief."

Cell cultures

But Wendy Barclay of the University of Reading in the UK, who "thought long and hard" about trying to create a pandemic flu virus before abandoning the idea, disagrees. "If you get a negative, how can you be sure that you have tested every option?" she says. Health authorities would still have to take the precaution of creating H5N1 vaccines.

Barclay concedes, however, that creating a virus that spreads in people might tell us how real the threat is. For instance, do you need one mutation for H5N1 to adapt to humans, or dozens?

Osterhaus is more optimistic. "Within the next decade, the whole thing will be solved," he says. "We will know the rules." In other words, once experts understand what the genetic sequence of any flu virus means, they could predict which animals it can infect, how severe it will be, and how easily it will spread.

Yet any new viruses could only be tested in human cell cultures or in animals, not on people. None of these methods exactly reflects how flu behaves in humans. This has led some flu experts to argue that attempts to create a pandemic virus should be put on hold until there is agreement on the best way of testing it.

Mix flu genes

And there is an even more fundamental objection to such experiments: the processes used to create the viruses may be too artificial. Researchers who want to see if H5N1 can be pandemic can take two approaches.

One is to tinker with the genome of the bird flu virus to mimic mutations that might occur naturally. This can be done precisely using a technique called reverse genetics. The other approach is to mix bird flu genes with those of human flu viruses, either using reverse genetics or through random re-assortment in cells infected with both types.

Although re-assortment sounds more natural, there is a problem. "Re-assortments can be made very easily in the lab using cells or animals," says flu expert Graeme Laver, formerly at the Australian National University in Canberra. "But one of the big mysteries is that [human] viruses that appear by reassortment are extremely rare in nature. There is something else involved that we don't understand."

Then there is the question of safety. The worst-case scenario is that researchers might end up engineering extremely dangerous viruses that would never have evolved naturally.

Masks or hoods

In 2001, for instance, Australian researchers created a mousepox virus far more virulent than any wild strains. This scenario is unlikely, but not impossible, says virologist Earl Brown of the University of Ottawa, Canada. "You could create something that is right out of whack, but I'd be surprised."

For those reasons, several prominent flu researchers told New Scientist that the H5N1 experiments must be done at the highest level of containment: Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4. But the CDC work is being done at BSL-3Ag, an intermediate level between BSL-3 and BSL-4. Workers wear half-suits with masks or hoods to prevent infection, for instance, rather than full-body suits as in BSL-4.

"US Department of Agriculture guidelines specify that work with highly pathogenic avian strains be done in BSL-3+ (also known as BSL-3Ag) laboratories," a CDC spokeswomen says.

One of the reasons is that the H5N1 virus is regarded as a non-contagious, treatable disease in humans. But this is not necessarily true of all of the genetically engineered strains that might be created. And drug supplies would quickly run out if an escaped virus triggered a major epidemic

A recent report by the US National Academy of Sciences recommends a series of checks be put in place to control such research. It says a panel of leading scientists and security experts should be set up to regulate it.

"Some public representation is another option," says Atlas, who helped draw up the report. At the moment, however, such experiments can be carried out without any special consultation.

Methods like reverse genetics might also be used to create new variants of other diseases. "You can make some pretty unusual things new viruses that would never have existed in nature," says Barclay. "It's not just an issue for flu."

With additional reporting by Michael Le Page


Rachel Nowak, Melbourne

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
What I am saying is, nobody (me included) remembers lyme when we were growing up. It seemed to start here in the mid-late 70's. And it is extremely virulent in some cases--most on this list have a soup of infections from the tick, and a hard time getting over them, requiring long-term multiple antibiotics and antimalarials.

---

First, we did work very closely with Garth Nicolson, both while he was still here in Texas and later after he left and moved his lab to California. He was a big help to us all along the way.

Second, for Strength, I've lived long enough to recall the days before CFIDS and LD, when "allergies" were the fad diagnosis. Then, something changed in the 1970s and especially in the early to mid-1980s when, first chronic mono or EBV, then later CFIDS became the fad diagnosis of the decade. Next, came Gulf War Syndrome in the early 1990s.

There's another book which helped us with our research. That book was "Emerging Viruses" by Leonard Horowitz. That book, taken together with Hilary Johnson's investigative documentary of the history of CFIDS, helps to establish a time line of events. Well, all of these "outbreaks" (Lake Tahoe, NV; Huntsville, TX: Lyndonville, NY; Old Lyme, CT) fit together too well to consider them as mere happenstance. They fit the time line of events too well. Long story. Too much detail to get into here.

I have no trouble conceiving of this, but then I had my first bit of "culture shock" back in 1996 when I first heard Leonard Horowitz speak at a medical conference in Boston, shortly after his book came out. I admit that I had a very hard time reading that book and an even harder time reading "Osler's Web" by Hilary Johnson because they were both so emotionally upsetting and depressing to me.

I'm grown to accept these shocking events as historical reality, and I no longer get so wrought up over them. I'm able to get past that point in order to try to deal effectively with the consequences of what has transpired. One can wallow only so long in the muck and mire before it's time to get up and wash off and get busy trying to clean up the mess that we find around us.

It's not an easy hump to get over. It takes a lot of time to get past the initial stage of revulsion and the temptation to live in denial about it, but eventually one does move beyond the initial state of shock and depression about it. One moves next to a stage of calm resolution and a steady resolve to try to work for a solution. That's where I am personally in my own evolution towards coming to grips with this sordid mess.

Well, I'm forgetting to respond to some of the other comments, and I'm very weary tonight, so I'm going to go ahead and post this now and not worry about whatever else it was that I had wanted to say, in response to some of the other very excellent previous comments.

quote:

---

Originally posted by lymiecanuck:
I read the HOT Zone from this guy
Lymiecanuck

---

Richard Preston wrote "Hot Zone"

Michael C. Carroll is the author of "Lab 257"

and a real page turner at that. Cant put it down

quote:

---

Originally posted by jen13:
One of the other sad things in the book was that editors were told by local businesses around Long Island & Connecticut, One more lyme disease story and I'm pulling my advertising, because it'll ruin business.

---

Same thing is true regarding Lake Tahoe which is a resort area. Even Lake Livingston, near the Huntsville area, in Texas is considered to be a resort area, enough so that property values were threatened by the local newspaper stories that came out back then.

My colleague was sitting in the office of the local elected representative when a phone call came in from a real estate agent urging the elected official to put a lid on this thing and make it fade away.

Well, needless to say, elected representatives know who contributes to their election campaigns, and likewise newspaper publishers know who pays for their advertising, so the next thing you know, this story was suddenly very buried and dead.

It doesn't matter whether the real estate has a high price tag or not, property owners stand to lose money if their area becomes known as non-desirable real estate.

Same old song, "N"th refrain.

There are vested political and economic self-interests which overrule Justice and Truth, far more often than most of us would like to believe.

Since 9/11, it's a little easier for folks to understand genuine Evil and the very real threat of BW terrorism. What's really hard to accept, though, is to wake up and realize that our own DoD has been involved in BW research since at least the end of WWII.

Historical documents support and attest to this, but the public is just now becoming aware of how their tax money for such novel medical research has been spent during the last half century.

I can't help but suspect that the enhanced pathogenicity of some of these microbes is due to the concept known as the "Russian cocktail" -- sorta' like those little Russian dolls which stack inside one another. My own intution tells me, though, that the only thing Russian about it is the catch name. The idea is to mix up microbes so that there are various disease agents combined together -- such as viruses and bacteria and fungal organisms or amoebic/parasitic organisms, whatever.

That makes it harder for the pathologists and infectious disease diagnosticians to identify what is the causative agent.

I also suspect that a major goal was to insert genes which encode for toxin production into bacteria, thereby enhancing their pathogenicity. "The gift that keeps on giving."

I am in the stage of assimilating it in a visceral way, even tho I always knew it, this book really brought it home. And I feel very sad about it. I am sure I will get past the sadness. As I said, I'm not sad we did the research--science will march on--I'm sad that we hurt our own shared humanity through some kind of carelessness that seems almost intentional because it is so flagrant.

I believe you are correct about enhancing pathogenicity in part by increasing toxin-producing capability.

Truth will out. Sooner or later, Truth will surface. Truth cannot be kept buried forever.

Thanks for posting this and thanks to others for the additional input.

I also have some russian information from earlier research I have done which talks about the splicing of several genes of bacterias and viruses to create superbugs

and I have always felt this was what was involved at Plum Island.
Further, I had done a study on Ft Detriecht quite some time ago, and heres an excerpt from them back when I found that tick borne illnesses were on "close watch level 3 for bioterror attacks". For some reason the NIH site removed "tick borne illnesses" from there "watch" list about two years ago. I suspect it was to cover that they were working on stuff????
**************************************
excerpts from Popov, the russian scientist and his interview:
NOVA: What was your specialty? What was the nature of your research?

Popov: Initially I was involved in the production of synthetic genes. That means we created in tubes, in vitro, [gene] constructs that did not exist in nature. The hope was, making those constructs, it would be possible to provide bacterial agents and viruses completely new properties which they did not have in natural conditions. So, for example, a virus could produce something absolutely difficult to imagine in natural circumstances, like peptides which destroy the immune system in a very special way.

NOVA: What would be the point of that?

Popov: Imagine a new weapon which is difficult to diagnose initially and then which is impossible to treat with conventional antibiotics. That would be [a good weapon] from the point of view of [masking] who originated the problem.

Correct, MS existed before as did Alzheimer's, ALS, Lupus etc. BUT, not every other person had a disease like they do today.

Today we get articles about early onset of Alzheimer's at age 55 and a huge incident of childhood diabetes, ADD etc. In the 50's all of these things exsisted but not to the degree that they do today.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Curley911:
Ask virtually any foundation and they will give you statistics of a rapid rate of increase of their disease.

---

Except for the foundations that fudge their numbers by undercounting, so that certain diseases continue to be counted as "orphan disease" when they are underestimated by an order of 1-2 magnitudes.

Read Montel Williams' book Climbing Higher and see what he has to say about the rarefied stats on MS and the role of the MS Society in undercounting the rate of increase of MS.

That NOVA clip was right to the point.

Curley, you are right--but I also don't think lyme was as virulent. WHen I mention lyme, people often cite a case of someone they know (around here) who ended up hospitalized because of it. Not that most people do, but enough do that almost everyone knows someone who got it so bad they ended up on IV abx in the hospital. What's that about?

What I have remember is that Lyme Disease was originally thought of as a devastating killer. What I see is way too many versions of it from slight neuro problems to slight IBS to very ill or dying. I see many MORE versions of it and in all stages. Maybe that's because of my increased awareness . .
also, like you said, there is a very virulent form out there that strikes people down very quickly.

I read a paper where the CDC made their diagnostice guidelines universal and in doing so they streamlined how the WB is read. They require more bands to be positive and read less bands. Something like that.

Either way, a MANY more people would be WB positive if they hadn't streamlined it so tightly. Why couldn't they have gone with the broader spectrum of reading the WB??? That made no sense. So one month a person is positive and the next month the CDC changes their criteria so they are not positive???

Who does this benefit? The list is too long to name . . . Who does it hurt? The VICTIM.

quote:

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Originally posted by jen13:
You know, Strength, I just am not interested in this dialogue. Not angry, not upset, just totally disinterested in engaging in it. Wish you well, tho.

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I just want to understand why you think that everyone here got hit with a bioweapon. Statements like that are possibly detrimental to "our" image as a whole (just take an objective look at sci.med...), so I'd like to know if your position is justified by there being more evidence for it than against it.

quote:

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Originally posted by StrengthToStrength:
I just want to understand why you think that everyone here got hit with a bioweapon. Statements like that are possibly detrimental to "our" image as a whole (just take an objective look at sci.med...), so I'd like to know if your position is justified by there being more evidence for it than against it.

I personally believe that modified version of TBVs may be in the wild, but I also try to remain objective about things. No idea why you won't discuss this with me, but, whatever. Wish you well on your crusade.

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StrengthToStrength,
The title of this thread is Lab257. The title of the book is Lab257. Why do you continue to question Jen13's "crusade" as you call it when you say haven't read the book?,

I believed in the biological warfare theory long before this book was published from good old fashioned research. As I continued to educate one of my doctors, he looked at me one day and said "we did this to ourselves you know?".

This is not a theory put forth by Jen13. It is in the book and if you read the rest of the posts you will find others who have read the book discussing the validity of this.

I believe staying educated about the latest developments in lyme literature does not compromise the intregity of this thread, it improves it. Maybe you can request the book at your local library.

The Plum Island borrelian strains seem to have been brought from a German lab in T�bingen, West-Germany, in the 40's, by the former nazi scientist Erich Traub. This could very well explain why all Lyme diseases in North America are borrelia burgdorferi's ones. In Europe, we have also borrelia garini and borrelia afzelii causing the disease. A "natural" contamination from Europe would probably have brought the three strains to America.

In Europe too "Lyme disease" increased in strength and virulence during the past decades. What is interesting also is that the center of the European epidemic is south of Germany. I wonder if this lab in T�bingen is not still in activity and could be the European leaky equivalent of Plum Island. I personnally was infected with a combo of germs in 90, a hundred miles away from T�bingen. Till now, I couldn't get rid of them.

I'm putting in my 2 cents too.

I finished the book a little while ago. My grandparents had a house in Jamesport where I spent my childhood summers. The North Fork of Long Island has not changed very much in the past 40 years. The amount of Lyme infections has.

I was also there in '91 when Bob passed over. I was in the eye right along with the workers on Plum Island.

The vet who reported the equine west nile outbreaks in Mattituck and Jamesport was my equine vet and his wife bred my dog.

Claudio's restaurant is patially owned by my cousin.

Another cousin of mine has a dictionary that is stamped "Property of Plum Island." Her mother worked there years ago. That proves that things were smuggled out even though they weren't supposed to be.

Believe me, the book may be disjointed and not written as well as Hot Zone but everything that he wrote about that I have any knowledge of was absolutely true.

What I want to do is get 100 copies and randomly put them in mailboxes down in the Hamptons. If those people had any knowledge that this stuff is going on around them, there would be a real outcry.

I'm not exactly sure what the answer is. If it has to remain open, then it needs a lot of funds thrown at it. It also needs to have some sort of oversight commitee to prove that the funds are being spent on safety and not bolstering an individual's importance in the scientific community.

It just makes me very sad that something so important can be treated with such apathy.

Just makes me wonder where the brown tide in the peconic bay (the water between the North and South Fork of Long Island) really came from. There was a time that you couldn't find a good clam for eating anywhere in the area. They were shipped from Maine.

I know that there is no way to prove any of the outcomes were due to Plum Island but the circumstantial evidence is very alarming.

Corgilla-currently a vector for Borrelia, Bartonella Henselae, Ehrlicia Chafeensis, Babesia Microti and Mycoplasma