The Officially Ignored Connection Between Lyme Disease and Plum Island

Lyme Disease is one of those illnesses that, unless you have it or know someone who afflicted by it, most people don’t know that much about it other than that it is caused by a tick bite.

Lyme Disease has been referred to as “the great imitator” because it mirrors many other awful medical disorders including chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, fibromyalgia, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Initially, Lyme causes a barrage of awful symptoms, including tiredness unrelieved by resting or sleeping, insomnia, abdominal pain, nausea, confusion, mood swings, joint pain, recurrent headaches, fever, chills, dizziness, difficulty concentrating or sustaining one’s attention and even impaired short-term memory, but ultimately it can harm organs and systems throughout the body, including the heart, the circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems, and the brain and nervous system.

Lyme Disease is pretty common these days, despite the fact that many people are fuzzy on the details. According to the CDC, Lyme was the sixth most common Nationally Notifiable disease in 2015 and the most commonly reported vector-borne illness in the U.S., thought to affect some 300,000 people a year in this country. Strangely though, when people attempt to get medical attention for Lyme Disease, a lot of times they are told that Lyme Disease is really rare and they probably have something else. Many times a person is forced to go through exhaustive medical testing for other ailments to rule those out before a doctor will even administer a test for Lyme Disease, but I’ll expand on that momentarily.

There may be a good reason why doctors are hesitant to test their patients for Lyme, even when those patients are fully willing to pay out-of-pocket for the testing for it and despite the fact that, for some reason in this era of modern medical technology, the test for Lyme is still pretty inaccurate.

For the longest time, the government has been implicated in and repeatedly denied any ties to the creation of Lyme Disease, despite some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

Lyme Disease was not discovered or recognized until the mid 70s when there was an outbreak of what doctors originally mistook for juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in several southeastern Connecticut towns including Lyme and Old Lyme, which is how the disease got its name. A newspaper archive search revealed that the bacteria that causes Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, wasn’t mentioned in print in newspapers until 1984 (although Google newspapers came back with nothing at all).

If you look at these towns on a map, you’ll notice they are right directly across the Long Island Sound from Plum Island, which has been a government animal disease research facility since the mid 1950s and doubled as a military biological warfare research facility.

It’s less than nine miles from shore to shore the way the crow flies.

The outbreak and concentration of Lyme Disease in this country centers around that place. The CDC admits that 95% of cases of Lyme come from just 14 states, the majority of which are located around Plum Island.

Plum Islands biowarfare ties date back to World War II and Operation Paperclip, a top secret government program to shield Nazi scientists from trial or punishment by quietly bringing them over to the U.S. and giving them new identities and U.S. citizenship in exchange for working for the government and military.

One such Nazi scientists was Dr. Erich Traub, lab chief during World War II for Nazi Germany’s Insel Riems – a secret biological warfare laboratory on an island (sound familiar?) in the Baltic Sea where Traub worked directly under Hitler’s #2 Heinrich Himmler. His job included spraying viruses from planes over occupied Russia. Prior to the war, just by the way, Traub had been involved in Nazi activities in the U.S. at Camp Siegfried on Long Island just 30 miles from Plum Island while he was here on a fellowship studying viruses and bacteria at, of all places, the Rockefeller Institute.

Plum Island was specifically named for Cold War biowarfare research alongside Dugway Proving Ground and Fort Detrick back in the early ’50s when the US biowarfare program and clandestine germ warfare trials first began. Seems like they got the location idea from Insel Reims.

Gee, can’t imagine who gave them that idea.

Dr. Erich Traub completed his Operation Paperclip duties working for the American biological warfare program from 1949 to 1953, during which time he consulted with the CIA and scientists at Fort Detrick before returning to West Germany in 1953 to run the country’s own Insel Riems-like experimental virus facility in Tübingen (with the U.S. government’s permission). Not only did USDA officials visit Traub’s lab over there, but Traub also briefly worked for the USDA which oversees Plum Island and throughout the ’50s he was in regular contact with Plum Island’s Director Doc Shahan. Dr. Traub was also at the Plum Island dedication ceremony in 1956 and visited the place at least twice after that in 57 and 58, when Plum Island’s lead scientist Dr. Jacob Traum retired and the USDA considered replacing him with who else? Dr. Erich Traub.

In the 70s, attorney John Loftus was hired by the office of special investigations, a unit set up by the Justice
department to look into Nazi war crimes. He was given a top secret clearance and allowed access to decades worth of classified documents. Among other things, Loftus turned up records of Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to the US and experimented with dropping poison ticks from planes to spread rare diseases. He also specifically mentioned in his book The Belarus Secret that he received information that suggested the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range during the early 1950s. This story was further validated by attorney Michael Carroll in his book Lab 257. Carroll claims that not only did a source who worked on Plum Island in the 50s tell him that some of the workers purposefully released ticks outdoors on the island in 1951 when it was still Fort Terry and that one of the scientists involved was called the quote, “Nazi scientist,” but Carroll says he dug up a box of 1950s USDA files from the National Archives vault that included three folders: two labeled “tick research” and one labeled “E. Traub”. Both were empty.

Even more damning, in an article in the Journal of Degenerative Diseases, Marjorie Tietjen reported that 60% of chronic Lyme patients are actually co-infected with several strains of mycoplasma, the most common one being “mycoplasma fermentens” which is patented by the U.S. Army and army pathologist Dr. Lo; Pathogenic mycoplasma, U.S. Patent 5,242,820 issued Sept. 7, 1993.

Today, the official story touted by government scientists is that the scientific evidence does not support Lyme Disease originating on Plum Island. This is despite the fact that researchers at Plum Island were experimenting with hundreds of thousands of hard and soft ticks on Plum Island where classified top secret biowarfare research was being carried out by the U.S. military for decades and the first outbreak of Lyme happened right directly across the sound less than nine miles from Plum Island where thousands upon thousands of birds fly AND despite the fact that they have been forced to admit culpability in the outbreak of other types of viruses on the island due to these experiments, the experimental animals for which were kept outside in open air pens up through the late ’70s, when a highly-contagious foot-and-mouth disease outbreak on Plum Island in 1978 ended in the government being forced to put over 200 of their own experimental animals to death.

The U.S. government continues to pretend like it couldn’t have possibly had a hand in Lyme Disease. Then again, the U.S. government denied that there were any biowarfare experiments on Plum Island for decades as well, up until documents proving otherwise were published by Newsday in 1993.

Meanwhile, Canada has been complaining in recent years of Lyme Disease proliferating there due to migratory birds picking up black-legged ticks when they fly south into the U.S. for the winter and come back with them.

Of course, I guess it would be an expensive and embarrassing PR/lawsuit nightmare if they did admit any culpability after this many decades of Americans suffering and probably dying from Lyme, which they would obviously avoid at all costs in the interest of national security.

Earlier I mentioned that it is believed Lyme Disease affects some 300,000 people annually in this country but that number is basically meaningless because people are forced through a medical merry-go-round just to be able to get tested for this disease, and then as Tietjen points out in that article above, many are only treated for it for a month on antibiotics and according to prestigious Yale University (which has only been implicated in government dirty work for decades with Plum Island right in its backyard), if the person still has Lyme Disease symptoms on the 31st day of antibiotic treatment, they are labeled as having something else (including “antibiotic-seeking behavior”), probably whatever affliction the disease has mimicked in their body. In this way, if they die, they die of something else in the official medical record, not Lyme Disease and they no longer get counted in the Lyme Disease statistics the same way unemployed people eventually “fall out of” the unemployment stats if they are unemployed long enough.

And that’s after the patient goes through the rigmarole to even be able to get tested in the first place. My mother went through this when she lived in Missouri and was bitten by a tick. Her doctor straight up told her Lyme Disease did not exist in Missouri, it wasn’t possible for a Missourian to get it, and that it was all in her head, even going so far as to write in her medical chart that the patient is convinced she has Lyme Disease even though her doctor apprised her of the “facts”. She had to go to a different doctor and plead her case to him, essentially arguing her way into even being allowed to get the test to begin with! This is how statistics continued to be toyed with even to this day in order to cover up an epidemic that is linked to government biowarfare research.

If you have ever been to Long Island, you see signs everywhere in parks warning you about ticks and Lyme Disease. The place is absolutely infested with them. The only thing more disconcerting than that is the fact that, after decades of animal disease research and burying the wastes on Plum Island, the whole place an environmental disaster. According to Carroll, repeated attempts to decontaminate the crumbling, unsecured lab 257 have failed. They finally had to build a whole new building (Lab 101) but in recent years the USDA and DHS, who jointly run Plum Island these days, have decided to move the whole thing inland to Manhattan, Kansas — nearly right smack dab in the middle of the country where a large majority of the nation’s cattle and hogs are bred, not to mention there’s a perfectly valid reason the makers of “Twister” decided to make Kansas one of the main settings in the film.

That’s right. As Congressman Michael Burgess pointed out at a September 2009 Oversight and Investigations hearing on Federal Oversight of High Containment Bio-Laboratories before the Committee on Energy and Commerce held just a week after the House vote on moving the Plum Island facility to Kansas:

“…the language of the resolution proudly touting that 45% of the fed cattle in the United States and 40% of the hogs produced in this country are in Kansas. Considering that food-and-mouth disease, which is the primary research being done at Plum Island, is a disease which can spread with devastating swiftness from humans to cattle and hogs… shouldn’t we have done our O&I hearing on the scientific evaluations being done at DHS before [emphasis added] we voted on a resolution saying that Kansas was the best pick?”

Gee… you think?