Conspiracy theoryNo, Lyme Disease Is Not an Escaped Military Bioweapon, Despite What Conspiracy Theorists Say

By Sam Telford

Could Lyme disease in the U.S. be the result of an accidental release from a secret bioweapons experiment? Could the military have specifically engineered the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive – and then let it somehow escape the lab and spread in nature?

Is this why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with this potentially debilitating disease?

It’s an old conspiracy theory currently enjoying a resurgence with lots of sensational headlines and tweets. Even Congress has ordered that the Pentagon must reveal whether it weaponized ticks.

And it’s not true.

Ticks can indeed carry infectious agents that could be used as biological weapons. Military research has long focused on ticks. Sites around Long Island Sound, near the military’s Plum Island research lab, were some of the first places where the American Lyme disease epidemic was identified.

But there was no release of the Lyme disease agent or any other onto American soil, accidental or otherwise, by the military.

I started working on Lyme disease in 1985. As part of my doctoral thesis, I investigated whether museum specimens of ticks and mice contained evidence of infection with the bacterial agent of Lyme disease prior to the first known American human cases in the mid 1970s.

Working with microbiologist David Persing, we found that ticks from the South Fork of Long Island collected in 1945 were infected. Subsequent studies found that mice from Cape Cod, collected in 1896, were infected.

So decades before Lyme was identified – and before military scientists could have altered or weaponized it – the bacterium that causes it was living in the wild. That alone is proof that the conspiracy theory is wrong. But there are plenty of other lines of evidence that show why Lyme disease did not require the human hand changing something Mother Nature had nurtured.

Lyme Is an Unlikely Bioweapon
I teach a graduate course in biodefense. Biowarfare, the use of biological agents to cause harm, was once an interest of the U.S. military and that of many other countries.

One of the most important characteristics of a biowarfare agent is its ability to quickly disable target soldiers. The bacteria that cause Lyme disease are not in this category.