Found in 4 comments on Hacker News
coopernewby · 2024-01-19 · Original thread
A history of the US Military's role in bioweapons and Lyme Disease is discussed in this episode with Kris Newby and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bitten Book on the potential origins of Lyme outbreak: https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...

While vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, Kris Newby was bitten by an unseen tick. That one bite changed her life forever, pulling her into the abyss of a devastating illness that took ten doctors to diagnose and years to recover from: Newby had joined the ranks of the 400,000 Americans who are afflicted with Lyme disease each year.

As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.

In a superb, meticulous work of narrative journalism, Bitten takes readers on a journey to investigate these claims, from tours of biological weapons facilities to interviews with biosecurity experts and microbiologists doing cutting-edge research, all the while uncovering darker truths about Burgdorfer. It also leads her to uncomfortable questions about why Lyme can be so difficult to both diagnose and treat, and why the government is so reluctant to classify chronic Lyme as a disease.

A gripping, infectious page-turner, Bitten will shed a terrifying new light on an epidemic that is exacting an incalculable toll on us, upending much of what we believe we know about it.

Let me add a pearl to that necklace (TL;DR: Morgellons disease is linked to Lyme disease):

> Exploring the association between Morgellons disease and Lyme disease: identification of Borrelia burgdorferi in Morgellons disease patients

> Morgellons disease (MD) is a complex skin disorder characterized by ulcerating lesions that have protruding or embedded filaments. Many clinicians refer to this condition as delusional parasitosis or delusional infestation and consider the filaments to be introduced textile fibers. In contrast, recent studies indicate that MD is a true somatic illness associated with tickborne infection, that the filaments are keratin and collagen in composition and that they result from proliferation and activation of keratinocytes and fibroblasts in the skin. Previously, spirochetes have been detected in the dermatological specimens from four MD patients, thus providing evidence of an infectious process.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5072536/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25879673/

Allow me to place the necklace around your neck now:

> Grossman added Kris Newby, an "excellent science writer connected to Stanford University," wrote a book in 2019 featuring interviews with Willy Burgdorfer, who is credited with the discovery of the microbe causing Lyme disease, and the book exposed that Burgdorfer had earlier "developed bioweapons for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)."

http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/25/c_1310146419.htm

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...

> As a science writer, she was driven to understand why this disease is so misunderstood, and its patients so mistreated. This quest led her to Willy Burgdorfer, the Lyme microbe’s discoverer, who revealed that he had developed bug-borne bioweapons during the Cold War, and believed that the Lyme epidemic was started by a military experiment gone wrong.

If you're interested in the intersection between Lyme disease and investigations into it being a bioweapons program gone wrong there's a recent book on the subject.

<https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...

I haven't read it, but I heard an interview with the author and the book sounds well researched. It doesn't reach a definitive conclusion that Lyme came from a bioweapons program gone wrong, but it does talk about other bioweapons programs similar to Lyme.

coopernewby · 2019-06-25 · Original thread
This new book, Bitten, describes some of the mystery surrounding the origins of the disease in the US in the 1960s. https://www.amazon.com/Bitten-History-Disease-Biological-Wea...

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