Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons

This book provides a great history of Lyme and tick related diseases. Easy to read and told in a nice narrative format.

Very interesting read on testing of Natural and Modified natural testing. In a real world testing ground

As a Lyme advocate and activist in our state's Lyme community for nearly two decades, I've been aware since the late 1990s that Lyme disease is indeed the result of US Biological Warfare Research gone awry. Like the author, I have collected several irrefutable documents as proof of my suspicions, but none as comprehensive or compelling as the amount of documentation which Kris Newby has compiled. My hat is off to her for making this disturbing material so fascinating to read that it's hard to put down -- a real page turner indeed!Readers interested in this same topic of BW research will enjoy other similar book titles, such as: Lyme Disease and the S.S. Elbrus by Rachel Verdon; Lab 257 by Michael Carroll; and Emerging Viruses by Leonard Horowitz, DDS. But none of these titles can compare to Kris Newby's entertaining style of writing, and none is as fascinating to read as this newest book on the subject of clandestine BW research.Now we can understand why there has been such a determined cover-up of the devastation caused by chronic late-stage Lyme disease and such a concerted effort at suppressing the diagnosis and denying access to adequate treatments by the Powers That Be. TPTB realized as early as 1994 that it would wreck the budget for our nation's health care system, especially the insurance companies, in light of the fact that AIDS had appeared on the scene at about the same time that Lyme disease did.But AIDS got all the money because AIDS patients were dying, so AIDS could not be denied, while Lyme patients were left to suffer in silence, without the dignity of a proper diagnosis, because relatively cheaper mind- and mood-altering drugs were available to numb them into obscurity after it had become apparent that then-current antibiotic protocols were not working effectively enough, except in those cases of early-stage Lyme disease which were uncomplicated by other co-infecting tick-borne pathogens. This book blows the cover off this horrible error in judgment on the part of our NIH and CDC.At 80+, I'm old enough to remember the end of World War II and the Cold War era, so I am able to be somewhat more forgiving about the failure in judgement by the decision makers involved in this national travesty than I expect most younger aged victims of Lyme disease are capable of being who did not experience that scary historical period. Those years are so remote now, and our history textbooks no longer do justice to that earlier era, so I worry that there might be an unwarranted backlash by Lyme victims towards those earliest decision makers who set this awful BW program into motion.Even the late esteemed Willy Burgdorfer was lured into the BW program unwittingly, much to his chagrin later when he eventually recognized how he had been duped into participating in this awful chapter of our nation's history, according to Kris Newby's exhaustive research.Hopefully, Kris Newby's book will become a positive force in changing the way in which mainstream medicine will regard victims of persistent Lyme disease in the future. This book is a must read for every IDSA (infectious disease) doctor in the country and for every doctor in the US who is guided by their own specialty's practice guidelines regarding Lyme disease, too.Therefore, I encourage every reader to purchase an extra copy to share with his/her own medical provider in hopes of accelerating changes in the negative attitudes towards victims of Lyme disease which are held by most mainstream health care practitioners today. Together, we can each become effective agents of change with regard to the current pejorative attitudes towards current victims of Lyme disease by sharing our copies of this important book about the clandestine BW history of Lyme disease.

A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.Newby’s book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll’s, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby’s book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll’s best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby’s research complements Carroll’s quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let’s look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. “Ticks,” Carroll writes, “find baby chicks irresistible.”In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors. After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea). Even Plum Island’s indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease — and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here’s what she adds to it.The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer’s work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. “He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested.”Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he’d written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for — knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering.Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn’t raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.“What this book brings to light,” Newby writes, “is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem.”Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone was trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don’t think we should forget that one purpose served — whether or not intended — by the “anthrax attacks” was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The attacks were falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let’s keep it that way!

Very well written. I couldn't put it down. Chuck full of true researched information but read like a spy novel. I found it riveting, and at the same time shocking and horrendous. As someone who has suffered from Lyme disease, it makes me incredibly angry how our government likes to play "God" and then when it all goes awry they cover it up and hide it from everyone like it never happened and leave everyone to just suffer from a disease they are responsible for. Gee sounds kinda familiar all over again..... Thank you to Kris Newby for having the courage to expose this!

The history and her story was very interesting and I am so happy that she received the help to get better. My family has also had a vector cause major disease and there were many similarities. Doctors need to take vector illnesses seriously and work together as a collaborative team -

Cet ouvrage en anglais, mais assez facilement accessible m'a été conseillé par le Professeur Perronne lors d'achats que j'ai fait sur Amazon. Si je me souviens bien.La vérité sur l'origine réelle de la maladie de Lyme avec une pensée émue pour le Professeur Willy Burgdorfer...

Wow, it's scary what governments got away with and probably still get away with today. Fascinating information,

Sad to read all this - but important....

Una storia stra importante. La storia del ricercatore che ha lavorato per il governo del USA era affascinante. Non è esattamente un libro che ti tiene al orlo della sedia, ma mantiene tuo interesse lo stesso. Mi è piaciuto molto e più importante - questo è informazione che il pubblico dovrebbe avere!!!

This is a gripping, sinister investigation. Having suffered seriously from Lyme Disease myself, something I share with the author, I am riveted as she digs persistently into a very political disease and finds very credible evidence to support her view of what looks very like a military experiment that escaped shoddy confinement and turned into one of the largest public health issues of the day both in Europe and the US. I was always puzzled that a disease could have a political dimension, but this one undoubtedly does. Now I begin to understand why. The book is a MUST READ for anyone touched by tick born infection, for doctors and public health officials. IT IS NOT simply catnip for those who love a good conspiracy theory. It is far more serious than that.It is likely that hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives seared with this thing. Some are crippled and in agony. Many have died.