Did the US try to weaponize ticks?

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

I know the Govt was not responsible for the origin. I too live near there. Before it was known as Lyme’s it was referred to as “Montauk Knee” and there are case studies dating back to the 19th century on the subject. There are colonial era bodies, and Pre-Colombian Native American skeletons with diagnostic patterns of arthritis damage showing that Lyme’s was fairly common here before the government that supposedly created or proliferated it even existed. Genetic studies of the pathogen itself indicate that it’s at least 1000’s of years old. And locals here (and in Lyme) were well aware of the disease well before the 70’s. Because it was pretty fucking common here always. What happened in 1975 was that the Bacteria itself was identified and named. Doctors had identified it as a disease, connected it to ticks. Even experimented with treatment using early antibiotics. Both in the US and Europe well before that.

Lyme disease | History

And yes. Lyme is just Lyme. There are multitudes of tick born illnesses but Lyme doesn’t get scare quotes, it’s just the name of the disease caused by Borrelia burgdorferi a specific species of tick born bacteria. No one is using it as a sobriquet for all tick born illness. Tick born illness in general is becoming something of a epidemic in certain areas. Especially here in the North East. But that’s more to do with environmental damage. Invasive species (like Japanese knot weed), over population of certain animals like deer and field mice, localized extinction of animals that once consumed a shit ton of ticks (like Bob White Quail). And Paradoxically reforestation of what was once cleared farm land, and conversion of farmland to heavily landscaped housing. Pretty backyard flowers and decorative plants (where those invasive species often came from) are awesome tick habitat.

You don’t need scary Plum Island to explain this shit. I know a lot of people who have worked there and live not far from the ferry that takes the staff over daily. Its a shit place to put an animal disease lab, but there’s nothing creepy going on there.

Besides the gateway to the Hollow Earth.

[NukeML]

Suggest adding that here:
Pedantic Digressions

[Wanderfound]

[jaded]

Even before the Biological Weapons Convention was signed in 1975, the U.S.Army began the design and construction of a facility in Tooele, Utah, to safely destroy the nation’s stockpile of chemical warheads. And there were a lot of warheads.

The biggest problem with chemical weapons is proliferation. Making them is cheap and easy. Mix up a batch of chemicals, pour them into a flask in the nose of an explosive warhead, and pile them up. They were easy to make and easy to store, and so the U.S. stockpiled tens of thousands of warheads through the 1960s. But as the country was in the middle of the Vietnam War, it became clear that we didn’t want these cheap-and-easy weapons of mass destruction on the battlefields where our own soldiers would have died, so the U.S. government banned them in 1969 and began to disarm, hoping the NVA would also agree not to make and deploy their own.

Disarming was easier said than done.

Disassembling a live warhead full of mustard gas or nerve agent, without killing the workers doing the job, is not a risk-free task. The workers had to remove the explosives from a potentially rusty and/or leaky old bomb (including the detonator designed to explode on impact); then load the warheads into a chamber to open the sealed flasks (that weren’t made to be re-opened after they were filled); extract the poisons from the flasks (that weren’t designed to be cleaned out); burn the compounds in fires hot enough to break their chemical bonds (chemicals designed to survive the bomb blast intended to disperse them); then re-burn the exhaust gasses (to prevent unburned chemicals from floating up the chimney). They also had to heat up the mostly-empty bomb casings so the metal scrap was safe to handle.

And they had to repeat this process for each and every warhead produced, hundreds of thousands of times, knowing that any mistake could have caused a detonation or chemical leak that might kill the personnel performing the destruction. They only recently completed their mission after over 30(!) long years of work, and they did so without an incident. (There’s an interesting documentary on the process that I’m too lazy to look up right now, but you can read about the Tooele facility here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooele_Chemical_Agent_Disposal_Facility .)

Biological weapons are almost the exact opposite. The bugs (viruses, bacteria, spores, ticks, bedbugs, or whatever) have to be kept in ideal conditions to keep them viable, otherwise they die and the weapons would be ineffective. They can’t simply manufacture a thousand tick-bombs and stack them in a bunker in the desert (eew.) And they can’t store just one petri dish of measles and hope to breed enough bacteria after the outbreak of hostilities to fill all their missiles. So they’d have to breed and farm tanks of them continuously to maintain a stockpile ready for war. Keeping them alive means they aren’t loaded into the warheads until it’s time to arm them.

Destruction would have also been the opposite. They wouldn’t have to worry about aged explosive casings as they did with the chemical weapons. All they’d have to do would be to heat the storage vats until they were sterile, then bleach out the remains.

So even if the U.S. did weaponize viruses, ticks, bacteria, spores, fungi, fleas, plague rats, or whatever, it literally would have taken much longer to organize the audit processes to confirm their complete destruction than it would have taken to actually kill the bugs. So if they had any weaponized ticks, they would have been destroyed long before the blueprints of the Tooele facility were even drawn up.

[Immutable_Mike]

If so, it may have backfired. TICK BITES CAN CAUSE VEGETARIANISM!!!

Mammalian meat allergy - myDr.com.au

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

More over typical tick born illnesses would make for shitty biological weapons. Taking Lymes as the example its relatively slow to incubate, long acting and chronic (if untreated) in nature, and for the most part non-lethal. Short term symptoms won’t stop an opposing force, its like a mild flu until long term symptoms set in. Having to wait decades for an enemy to succumb to arthritis and less common complications like neurological problems isn’t exactly effective tactics. Effective biological weapons are usually considered those that act fast, kill or cripple in short order. And don’t persist in the target area to infect your own troops. Lyme’s, and most other tick born illness fail on every front except one. They don’t transmit directly from person to person. There’s a couple steps in between.

@Immutable_Mike

TICK BITES CAN CAUSE VEGETARIANISM!!!

Not vegetarianism. You can still eat poultry, seafood, reptiles, dairy (usually), and primates.

The tick bite triggers a violent allergy to a carbohydrate called Alpha Galactose found in the muscle tissue of all non-primate mammals. Its not just eating. Skin contact can cause a reaction. And when it first happens the patient goes through a hyper reactive phase where they’re effectively allergic to damn near everything. There’s been a couple rare cases where people jist stay hyper reactive.

My brother got bit by a whole fuck load of lone star ticks. Ended up in the ER like 6 times before they figured out what it was and his immune system settled the fuck down. Now he carries an EpiPen and is incredibly sick of chicken.

[yadayada]

Or taxonomy.

[RioRico]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

More over typical tick born illnesses would make for shitty biological weapons.

What would be better vectors for engineered diseases? Wait, don’t tell me! But I wonder if limits in cold-war-era biotech still apply – what couldn’t be done than, can be now. How immune are we from a BLOOD MUSIC scenario where gene-hackers unleash inexorable microbes that reduce humanity to goo?

I hope the flesh-eating bacteria devour me quickly, painlessly.

[Ryuthrowsstuff]

Well generally you might want something deadly. Even for the deadlier tick borne diseases you’ve got a problem in that they can’t even be reliably transmitted and a good lot of them are treatable by common medications. These pathogens generally require something in the tick in order to transmit to humans, so you aren’t going to be spraying them around. Not every tick is gonna host them. Not every bite is gonna transmit. Ticks don’t stay put, and they bite other things besides humans. They mostly bite other things besides humans.

But on that note I’d ask you to point us at any disease based biological weapon based on an engineered pathogen. We haven’t seen too many engineered bacteria and viruses period none the less as anti-personel weapons. There’s a pretty short list of diseases that have been considered usable on that front, and you’d think “they” would start with that.

Tick-borne disease

Biological warfare

The problem with diseases as weapons is that they’re not storable, not predictable, not controllable. And you just exacerbate that by picking the wrong one. Taking a century to slowly make some significant portion of a geopolitical rival’s civilian population insane by salting them with syphilis isn’t exactly a practical way to achieve any goal other than making a bunch of people insane with late stage syphilis. And if your rival has access to penicillin you’re kind of boned on that front. Even were that your goal, its sort of a shitty way to make a bunch of people go crazy balls insane if there’s any chance your own people will get up to naughty business along the way and go coocoo bananas too.

For the ticks you can just add the ticks as an additional complication.

There’s very much a practicality problem here.

It is for this reason that I propose we focus all efforts on the portal to the Hollow Earth. Something down there has got to be ril good for killing. Brain squid? Radioactive Dinosaur? Potentially much more effective.

[RioRico]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

But on that note I’d ask you to point us at any disease based biological weapon based on an engineered pathogen.

I know of none. Doesn’t mean they don’t or can’t exist. Is it irrational to fear clever guys and gals whipping up something inexorable, indefensible? Ticks as we know them are likely not effective vectors for diseases we know. But I’ll bet on human ingenuity and depravity to find efficient means of genocide.

[Wanderfound]

Check out the history of the Japanese WWII biowar program, and what happened to it post-war.

From Michael Pembroke’s Korea: Where the American Century Began.

[smut_clyde]

@Ryuthrowsstuff

Taking Lymes as the example its relatively slow to incubate, long acting and chronic (if untreated) in nature, and for the most part non-lethal.

You don’t deserve Chicken Plague.

[heh]

I’d think ticks would be one of the less practical ways to spread pathogens. Very hard to control once released. Very hard to prevent spreading back to your own ranks.

[FGD135]

@Tribune

It may have escaped and moved into the White House

[Israel_B]

Lindsey Fitzharris (DrLindseyFitz)

[NukeML]

Certainly not engineered in the sense that they were genetically engineered, but some otherwise obscure pathogens were bred on a massive scale that would never be possible in nature, which was a remarkable feat of engineering. As far as what the Russians were doing I’d suggest reading Ken Alibek’s book “Germs”.

Remember biological warfare was not limited to creepy crawlies that had to be handled with kid gloves. Bacteria such as Anthrax can be stored for years. Viruses such as smallpox can also be virulent for years. And toxins, chemicals produced by living things, could be stored practically indefinitely.

In the end, as stated by others here, the unpredictability of their implementation meant they were impractical in the field so the US banned their use. Of course, we pitched it as a humanitarian gesture.

[karl_jones]

A “feeder of lice” was a job in interwar and Nazi-occupied Poland, in the city of Lwów at the Institute for Study of Typhus and Virology of Rudolf Weigl (Polish: Instytut Badań nad Tyfusem Plamistym i Wirusami prof. Rudolfa Weigla) in Lwów (Lviv, Ukraine). It involved serving as a source of blood for lice, a typhus vector, which could then be used to develop vaccines against the disease.

Initially begun in 1920 by Weigl, during the Nazi occupation of the city it became the primary means of support and protection for many of the city’s Polish intellectuals, including the mathematician Stefan Banach and the poet Zbigniew Herbert. While the profession carried a significant risk of infection, thanks to Weigl’s patronage the feeders of lice obtained additional food rations, were protected from being shipped to slave labor in Germany or German concentration camps, and were allowed additional mobility around the occupied city.

Typhus research involving human subjects, who were purposely infected with the disease, was also carried out in various Nazi concentration camps, in particular at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen and to a lesser extent at Auschwitz.

Feeder of lice

[Mangochin]

Unit 731. There was a series of gross out exploitation films made in Hong Kong about them.

Men Behind the Sun

The US passed on prosecuting their leaders for war crimes at the end of the war in exchange for their research data. It turned out the data was complete garbage. Evidently subjecting human beings to various tortures and creative murder in the name of science doesn’t quite yield the usable results one hopes for.

[anon85905360]

[mous]

weaponizing ticks with lymes disease could lead to battles lasting 15 - 60 yrs before enemy combatants are disabled. I can see why they eventually chose bullets instead.