Lyme Disease & the Weaponization of Borrelia

Could Borrelia have been weaponized post-WWII?

By Mike Sawyer
(Reproduced with permission of author)

After I wrote a Lyme patient booklet in 1995, many patients sent me information about Plum Island and bio-warfare research in America.

I had said in my booklet that such a scenario was unfounded and was just speculation.

To describe these advocates of Lyme disease being a bio-warfare experiment gone awry as persistent would be a gross understatement.

I never paid much attention because if I couldn’t prove anything then what’s the point in saying anything? But one very insistent person put a challenge before me. He asked me this question in 1995:

‘If you only had the tools available to you that scientists had in post WWII 1946, how would you go about weaponizing Borrelia bacteria to disable the enemy?”

That was an intriguing question to me and the more I toyed with the concept in my mind the more I realized exactly how I would go about the process.

This intellectual exercise is purely academic because only an arrogant fool would think they could ever contain this kind of weapon, but what was scary was it only took me an hour to come up with the following procedure. (Do not try this at home!)

Step 1:

All Borrelia are associated with at least one main tick host, and usually have one main reservoir animal host in nature.

So first collect all the species of ticks and their associated reservoir animals.

Then rank the Borrelia species in terms of how pathogenic they are. Separate the Borrelia into groups such as: Hematologic strains, and Neurologic strains. Then choose your pathogen according to what you want it to do to the victims.


A fast acting highly virulent Neurologic Strain like Borrelia duttoni will disable an enemy unpredictably, some will have symptoms quickly possibly even killing them, some will slowly become mentally compromised.

Certainly B. duttoni would diminish their ability to be effective soldiers. A neurologic strain is stealthy, difficult to detect by any tests (remember in 1946 testing was primitive and had to be retrieved from an animal host because culturing was impossible) and such an insidious infection may take months to manifest symptoms and months to diagnose. Treatment would probably only be partially effective because of the bacteria’s residence deep in the human brain.


A species like Borrelia crocidurae is so hematologic that it would be immediately detectible in the blood by a simple blood smear or live blood under darkfield. Immediate symptoms would give it away early. Treatment would be very effective and long-term effectiveness as a weapon would be very limited. When detected early and treated with penicillin it would have low potential for death. But if left untreated, death by blood clots and embolism would be eminent and painful.

For many decades in East Africa, B. crocidurae caused the death of 1/3 of all children under the age of six.

So lets say for military purposes Borrelia duttoni is the better choice.

Step 2:

B. duttoni is only found in one tick the Ornithidoras moubata, a tick that would stand out like a sore thumb if found anywhere but North Africa.

So the next logical step is to get B. duttoni to live in a tick that looks as though it was common to the area where it is intended to be dispersed. To have a wide geographical range, the choice of tick must be common enough to be found almost everywhere.

The obvious choice are Ixodes hard shelled ticks, a tick that Tick Borne Relapsing Fevers generally do not inhabit.

The Ixodes hard-shelled ticks fit the bill, but how do you get B. duttoni from the Ornithidorous moubata soft-shelled tick, to live inside a hard-shelled Ixodes tick?
Enter the Host reservoir: The host reservoir for B. duttoni is specific, but probably not exclusive. So by trial and error you would introduce other mammals and let the infected O. moubata ticks feed on animals common to Ixodes ticks until one mammal is not only infected, but also maintains the infection in its blood.

You have now created a new host reservoir for B. duttoni , and a species that Ixodes ticks commonly feed on.

If this doesn’t work to your expectations then you must incubate or culture the B. duttoni with other Borrelia species and hope natural gene sharing occurs and a hybrid Borrelia with more domestic properties is created.

There is evidence that this occurs in nature probably in the belly of ticks.

Eventually a new host animal that is a common to being targeted by Ixodes ticks may eventually be infected, and the Ixodes ticks that have never carried a B. duttoni infection before may for the first time become transiently infected with a B. duttoni analog when allowed to feed on the new infected host animals.

But now there is a problem: conceivably the newly introduced ticks could infect local animals, and the ticks could conceivably breed with the local Ixodes ticks.

So now you must invest time and effort to create a new
“hybrid-tick-species”. The idea is that a hybrid tick could breed with local ticks, but the offspring would be infertile and the tick lineage would die out.

(When Ixodes dammini species of Tick was first discovered by Dr Andrew Spielman (US Navy Intelligence) it appeared it could not give rise to fertile offspring when bred to Ixodes scapularis, but Dr. James Oliver showed that it could and soon the Ixodes dammini species dissolved into thin air as it matriculated from its isolated population to becoming intertwined with the other local ticks.)

Once a new hybrid tick that looks like a local tick is created and you infect it with your new Borrelia hybrid species, then you are ready for a real world trial.

Lets say you release it in an area that you feel you can contain like an island. Then you wait and observe if local reservoir animals accept or reject the new Borrelia species. Next you wait and observe if the tick breeds with local ticks and proliferates? Or does it die out as planned?

Then you wait and observe who gets infected? How disabled are the victims? How easy is it to detect/diagnose? Does it respond to treatment? What effect does it have on productivity and function?

Of course such a scenario is academic and ridiculous because anyone could see a dozen ways it could get out of hand, not the least of which is the problem of birds transporting the infected ticks to the mainland.

So if the infection escaped containment, how would you contain such a dilemma?

First maintain that it is a brand new never seen before tick species isolated to that region of the world and only that region.

Then maintain that it is a new Borrelia species and that it is nothing to worry about. Try to distance it from other Borrelia species especially the ones that can get into the brain and may be incurable. Do not discuss this species in terms of it being related the Relapsing Fevers some of which by 1945 were known to be incurable once established in the brain. So deny that the new species enters cells, or crosses the Blood Brain Barrier.

Since Borrelia turicatae was reportedly deemed incurable in rats in 1945, you would especially want to distance this new Borrelia from B. turicatae and B. duttoni and other species that would alarm the local population.

To minimize public harm you would deny that it gets into the brain, you would deny that it can be passed from mother to child, you would deny that it is an intracellular infection, you would deny that it is sexually transmitted, you would deny that the infection is persistent and can survive antibiotic treatments, you would deny it evades the immune system, and you would insist that the tests can detect it 100% of the time, and you would control all testing so you can insist on the accuracy of the tests and know who is infected. Eliminate the competition in testing and create testing protocols that favor negative findings.

Create a Lab Strain to create and control all Lyme tests

Since Borrelia is constantly changing it’s genetic make-up: Creating a new strain that is consistent and easy to culture would be a way to control all Borrelia testing because all labs across the country would have a free reservoir of Borrelia that is easy to culture and never changes.

Most labs would use this Lab Strain to make their tests, and never know that it was created to keep Lyme research stagnant. Never mind that it is a laboratory creation not seen in nature, the greed and competition of the labs will force them to choose the cheapest and easiest option to market their tests.

Now to do all of this and not be caught, you would need a military covert background, and be protected and insulated by the government by an established internal authority within the government that can take emergency action if needed. Such a response team already exists within the CDC it is called the EIS.

Not only would unleashing such an infection be immoral and unconscionable, it would be illegal so those involved would become very defensive and capable of anything to protect themselves including lying, and manipulating scientific data and operating an operation of disinformation.

Thankfully we have the CDC and EIS to protect us!

I hope this scenario I wrote in 1996 never comes true, because if it did who can we trust to protect us?

END OF ARTICLE

Comments by Elena Cook:

1. Relapsing fever Borrelia continue to be a major and deadly scourge in Africa. In some areas it is the number one bacterial infection, and is especially dangerous to under fives and pregnant women.

2. The most recent research indicates that many highly persistent Lyme disease infections of the Central Nervous System (CNS) are caused by borrelia strains that genetically resemble Relapsing fever more than they do Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), which mainstream medicine has been led to believe is the only type responsible.

3. Routine tests to detect Bb will not detect Relapsing-fever type Borrelia.

4. Japanese and Nazi biowarfare scientists conducted horrific bacteriological experiments during the 30's and 40's on live prisoners. |It appears the Axis forces had a special obsession with spirochaetes, and knew they could exist in non-spiral forms which were almost impossible to detect with the technology of the time. They also knew that some forms were resistant to the brand-new wonder drug penicillin.

With an almost limitless supply of captive men, women and children on which to experiment, a favourite tactic was to infect one victim, take blood or tissue specimens just before the patient's agonising death, and then inject extracts of this into the next victim. This step would then be repeated over and over until "super-strains" - highly virulent and highly adapted to infecting humans - were obtained.

5. Dr. Sawyer has mentioned the deliberate modification of host-vector relationships in order to breed relapsing fever borrelia, (which normally infect so-called "soft" ticks) that would be adapted to hard ticks. An additional consideration might be the use of an animal that is already able to live inside both soft and hard ticks, and which can harbour bacteria inside it. Nematode worms come into this category.

A few years ago Dr Eva Sapi and colleagues found nematode worms frequently inhabit the same Ixodes ticks that carry Lyme borrelia in eastern United States. Nematodes have also been found in Ixodes ricinus, considered the main Lyme disease vector in Europe.

This year, pathologist Alan MacDonald, MD FCAP, founder of the non-profit Dr Paul H Duray foundation, found Borrelia (both Bb and relapsing fever types) hidden INSIDE nematode worms in autopsy brain tissue/CSF of victims of Alzheimer's disease, Lewy Body dementia, MS and Glioma, as well as in blood smears from living patients with psychiatric syndromes, chronic fatigue and other disabling syndromes.

Resources:

http://www.durayresearch.wordpress.com

http://www.elenacook.org/spirowarfare.html

http://www.elenacook.org/bwsept06.html

http://www.spirodementia.wordpress.com