Forgotten History #3 - Plum Island and Lyme Disease

Government in the United States has an interesting way of defending itself against valid criticism. They quickly try to discredit their detractors by calling out "Conspiracy Theory", a term that was coined during the speculation around John F. Kennedy's assassination. The term is nearly humorous, because what they are generally defending, is exactly that, a Conspiracy.

Plum Island is an island in the Town of Southold in Suffolk County, New York in the United States. The island is situated in Gardiners Bay, east of Orient Point, off the eastern end of the North Fork coast of Long Island. It is about 10 miles (16 km) by water to Old Lyme, Ct. It is about 3 miles (4.8 km) long and 1-mile (1.6 km) wide at its widest point....The island is the site of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) which was established by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1954.

According to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, the primary purpose of the level 3 biohazard lab is to protect US farmers and ranchers from foreign born, infectious, animal disease, like Foot and Mouth disease. This is directly from DHS's website:

Since 1954, the DHS S&T Office of National Laboratories (ONL) Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) has served as the nation’s premier defense against accidental or intentional introduction of transboundary animal diseases (a.k.a. foreign animal diseases) including foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). PIADC is the only laboratory in the nation that can work on live FMD virus (FMDV). The lab and its staff of nearly 400 employees provide a host of high-impact, indispensable preparedness and response capabilities, including vaccine R&D, diagnostics, training, and bioforensics among others.

Foot and Mouth Disease may be the primary focus of the laboratories' work, but when taking a closer look, plenty of other experimentation was done in the field of biological weaponry.

Dr. Erich Traub was a German scientist, considered to be at the top in the field of biological warfare through the infection of ticks and mosquitoes. His career started with a fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute on Princeton University's campus, in the early 1930s. He worked with prominent scientists before returning to Germany, just before the outbreak of WWII.

Upon return to Germany, Traub was employed by a secret lab called Insel Riems, where he was in charge of the Third Reich's virological and bacteriological warfare program in World War II. He worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. One of their focuses was conducting warfare with ticks, mosquitoes and other insects, that been infected with viral and bacterial injections, which would be air dropped upon an unsuspecting enemy.

As the war was ending, the US had initiated Operation Paperclip, an OSS/CIA secretive program to recruit Nazi Scientists out of Germany and put them to work for the US government. Dr. Erich Traub was recruited in this program and sent to work at Ft. Dietrick in Maryland.

Nominally under the jurisdiction of the USDA (Department of Agriculture), Plum Island was also used for military biological warfare research on animal diseases. In that regard, it was involved with Fort Dietrick, the Army's top chemical and biological warfare facility. Note that Traub was at the foundation of the Plum Island/biological warfare nexus. "Just months into his PAPERCLIP contract, the germ warriors of Fort Detrick, the Army's biological warfare headquarters, in Frederick, Maryland, and CIA operatives invited Traub in for a talk, later reported in a declassified top-secret summary: Dr. Traub is a noted authority on viruses and diseases in Germany and Europe. This interrogation revealed much information of value to the animal disease program from a Biological Warfare point of view. Dr. Traub discussed work done at a German animal disease station during World War II and subsequent to the war when the station was under Russian control.' Traub's detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems, and his activities there during the war and for the Soviets, laid the ground work for Fort Detrick's offshore germ warfare animal diseased lab on Plum Island. Traub was a founding father. . . ."

Dr. Traub worked on Plum Island for at least four years, before the facility had been officially opened. There are eyewitness accounts of the early work done there, included releasing ticks into the wild on the island. The only official records showing that he'd even been to the island, indicate he was only there three times after the official opening in 1956.

Lyme disease showed up in Old Lyme, Ct, in 1975, when contracted by a young boy. Old Lyme is ten miles North of Plum Island, across the Long Island Sound. The disease stymied the medical community until the early eighties, when an Austrian biochemist made the initial breakthrough.

Borellia burgdorfieri turned out to be the single most complex bacterium known to man. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. As time went on, other subsidiary diseases were discovered to go hand in hand with Lyme. These include chronic schizophrenia, psychosis, severe osteoarthritis, lupus, bladder problems, bipolar delusions, vertigo, encephalitis, infection of the brain stem and many others. Some researchers believe that multiple sclerosis is also a cofactor of Lyme... It didn't make sense that Lyme would suddenly emerge, seemingly out of nowhere, in one town in rural Connecticut. Some of these investigators believe they found traces of borrelia in preserved insect and animal samples taken from nearby Shelter Island, as well as Long Island. The samples dated from the late 1940s to the early 1950s—the timeframe in which Erich Traub was infecting ticks on Plum Island.

Former Justice Department Prosecutor, John Loftus, who had been hired by the Office of Special Investigation in 1979, wrote a book titled 'The Belarus Street'. The book was the summation of his investigations into Operation Paperclip and Nazi's hiding in the US. His investigation led him to the scientists working in secret on Plum Island. This passage is from the preface of 'The Belarus Street':

'Even more disturbing are the records of the Nazi germ warfare scientists who came to America. They experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. I have received some information suggesting that the U.S. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950's. . . .Most of the germ warfare records have been shredded, but there is a top secret U.S. document confirming that 'clandestine attacks on crops and animals' took place at this time."

Part of his investigation brought him to the National Archives where he located files that connected Traub and ticks once again.

"Research unearthed three USDA files from the vault of the National Archives-two were labeled TICK RESEARCH and a third E.TRAUB. All three folders were empty. The caked-on dust confirms the file boxes hadn't been open since the moment before they were taped shut in the 1950's. Preposterous as it sounds, clandestine outdoor germ warfare trials were almost routine during this period.

The connection between Lyme Disease and Plum Island is not an open and shut case. Too much of the history has already been destroyed and the participants, now deceased. A few factors outside of the case that I have already presented, that bother me regarding biowarfare using ticks: The arrival of the non-indigenous ticks in the tri-state area and the lack of options from the medical community, regarding the disease.

The lonestar tick was found only in Texas, up until the outbreak of Lyme in the Northeast. It's mysterious appearance has no explanation nor trail of migration. The lonestar tick and the deer tick are the two carriers of lyme disease and are both now prevalent in the Northeast, up into Canada.

Lyme has long been associated with a bulls-eye rash appearing where a person is bit by an infectious tick. Those people that develop the bulls-eye are the lucky ones. The rash automatically triggers a medical response with a course of one months worth of antibiotics and has a good chance of neutralizing the Borellia.

The issue I have with the medical community is that there is a huge population contracting Lyme in the US and the tests that are offered to patients are not very good at determining a positive result for the disease. If your body hasn't taken up a strong enough fight against the Lyme, your test will come out inconclusive, not scoring high enough.

Lyme hits close to home in my life. My wife was damaged by Lyme before I met her. It has given her chronic back pain, joint stiffness and the beginnings of arthritis. She also works for a county health department, where one of her lesser functions is to record and follow up on infectious diseases, in the state of New Jersey. Lyme is one of these diseases.

Her first hand experience in dealing with her own Lyme and lack of diagnosis, as well as hearing directly from doctors about the numbers of false negatives that are coming through their offices, makes her an anecdotal expert in my opinon. Having Lyme and scoring a false negative on the test, leaves the infected patient in limbo. It's not enough of a result to kick in a month long treatment, insurance won't cover it, and it leaves the doctor open to possible lawsuit, for not following established protocols.

There are a band of outlaw doctors in the medical community that are considered "Lyme literate" and are schooled in diagnosing Lyme with a higher degree of certainty than your standard MD. These doctors run their practices without the benefit of insurance companies covering their patients and in the end, are very expensive for the average person to go to for treatment. Having seen what Lyme has done to my wife, I would highly recommend using their practices if you have suspicions about your health, whatever the cost.

I believe this article brings forward some interesting aspects of the secret government/military bioweapons programs, it's potential to have created and possibly spread of Lyme Disease. There is no smoking gun in this investigation, but the anecdotal evidence, brings together quite a few factors that lead me to believe that Lyme Disease found it's way off Plum Island and into the lives of many people.

Whether a tick found a ride on a migrating bird, took the ferry on a person or an animal, there are too many coincidences to write off the theory. Borellia doesn't just show up on it's own in a small town in Connecticut, with no prior history. The original clusters of infections occurred on Long Island and around Old Lyme, the two nearest landfalls to Plum Island. Take a look at this yourself.