Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease by Kris Newby

Ninety-five million years ago the brontosaurus and T. rex ruled the earth. A much smaller creature harried these dinosaurs sucking their blood—the tick. When the asteroid(s) collided with the planet 60 million years ago turning the climate into an ice age, the dinosaurs faced a catastrophic species extinction, but not the tick. It continued to evolve over the eons adapting itself to the terrain, weather, fauna, and flora. Trillions if not quintillions of generations later, the tick has become a ubiquitous predator capable of siphoning blood from all animals. The tick has evolved to efficiently sense changes in temperature, carbon dioxide, and ammonia identifying the approach of an animal through its forelegs. While some ticks await direct proximity of a host from a grassy stalk, the Lone Star tick hunts its prey. Once the tick has established a suitable
location to seek its meal such as underneath the nape of the neck, it lowers its three-prong jaw, bites through the epidermis and injects an anesthetic substance into the animal. Burying and anchoring itself into the underlying tissue, it emits a cementing agent and a blood thinner ensuring that clotting will not interfere with blood extraction. As it sucks away blood, the tick injects a myriad of microorganisms, bacteria, parasites, viruses, worms, and more into the host. These tick-borne pathogens share a symbiotic relationship with the tick facilitating the tick’s physiology. Unfortunately, these pathogens can cause a variety of diseases, some of which cause low-grade flu symptomatology, but others are far more severe and can persist indefinitely. Meanwhile the tick drops off after becoming engorged and then deposits a clutch of several thousand eggs repeating the cycle of tick development and predation.

After nearly one hundred million years, the tick has figured out survival; and its vampire activity has led to millions of humans becoming sickened with a diverse group of illnesses that have largely stumped the medical profession. The disease that most of us are concerned with is Lyme disease thought to be due to infection with a spirochetal bacterium, Borrelia burgdoferi, named after tick expert, Willie Burgdofer. Yet, the tick is just as likely to carry many other microorganisms, not the least of which are very tiny bacteria, Rickettsia, one of which, Rickettsia rickettsii, named after the investigator who first identified them, Ricketts, causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever. When Mormon settlers travelled through the Rocky Mountains in the mid to late 1800s, it was not infrequent for them to be bitten by a tick and be infected with spotted fever. More than a century later tick bites have become associated not just with a Rickettsial infection, but one caused by a spirochetal bacterium. In Africa, a tick-borne Borrelial spirochete is responsible for infection with relapsing fever. In fact, ticks are well adapted to carry multiple bacterial and parasitic organisms. However, in the US, tick bites up until the 1970s were generally limited to Rocky Mountain spotted fever. How did the tick suddenly become the vector of a very new disease, Lyme disease, localized to Connecticut, New York, and New England?

In Kris Newby’s fascinating book, Bitten, the new disease seemed to begin with an outbreak of babesiosis caused by the malarial-like parasite, babesia, that occurred on an island off of Massachusetts coast, Nantucket, in 1968. Where did this organism come from? In 1972 a cluster of individuals on eastern Long Island developed Lyme disease arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. However, neither the CDC nor regional health authorities understood the tick-based causes of these outbreaks despite intensive investigation through the mid-1970s. Burgdofer, who grew up and was educated in Switzerland, was hired by the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, in Hamilton, Montana, in the mid-1950s to study ticks and other arthropods causing parasitic disease. He became adept at going out in the woods and capturing thousands of ticks, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, as well as other insects, bringing them back to the laboratory for study under the microscope as well as on the lab bench. He used a “glass” knife to be able to carefully dissect the tick to study the organisms contained within. Willie was noted to be fastidious in his research and spent hours and hours researching ticks and identifying the tick’s symbiotic organisms, some pathogenic, some not so.

In the early 1960s the US government transformed Burgdorfer’s mission not to study ticks, but to learn how the tick could be used in biological warfare. Could the tick carry more aggressive illness-inducing organisms that could be dropped on an enemy force incapacitating them? This was the mission that Burgdorfer agreed to do—not just in Hamilton, Montana, but also at Ft. Dietrick in Maryland, where the armed forces conducted bio-weapon testing during the 1950s-60s until Nixon terminated the program in 1968. The testing was intensive and exhaustive. Willie wanted to know if one could manipulate hormone physiology to cause tick fertility to dramatically increase—that experimentation failed. Much more rewarding was experimenting with a variety of different organisms to determine if ticks would carry a pathogen successfully enabling new diseases to be transmitted after a tick bite. A variety of viruses, bacteria, and parasites were tried. Burgdorfer’s work revealed that individual tick species would adapt symbiotically, hosting certain microorganisms but not others. One of the experiments authorized by Ft. Dietrick was an attempt to drop crates carrying massive numbers of ticks like an airborne bomb. Although it was never determined how successful the ticks were in infesting bombed areas, the airmen conducting such experimentation developed tick-borne illness. Perhaps the most insidious experimentation was conducted with aerosolized pathogens that were released like insecticide spraying from airplanes. Burgdorfer witnessed a prototype of this being done on a large animal herd with all animals becoming ill after inhalation of the pathogen.

What Newby’s book attempts to prove but never develops absolute proof for is that the tick bio-weapon research may have gone awry and ticks infected experimentally with pathogens may have inadvertently escaped into our ecosystem. Newby suggests that the epicenter for such experimentation that went awry could have been on the Atlantic seaboard over eastern Long Island and Nantucket. Burgdorfer’s research in the late 1970s focused on a Rickettsial organism that was quite different from the R. rickettsii, R. montanensis, and most other Rickettsii. The new organism had a similarity to an organism observed in sheep in Europe—it was labelled in his work as the Swiss agent, a rickettsial organism resembling R. montanensis. Burgdorfer’s research in 1980 took a major turn after his careful microscopic work found a spirochetal organism in the tick, which was associated with patients having Lyme disease. After careful antibody studies confirmed that the spirochete was the causative organism, Burgdorfer wrote a paper in Science detailing his findings. His work shocked the world as no one had associated a spirochete with Lyme disease, and he became an instant sensation with academicians and the public in 1982. For reasons that have never been explained the Swiss agent disappeared from Willie’s work as well as the scientific literature. Researchers currently studying Rickettsiae do not have any information about the Swiss agent and it is not discussed in medical reports about Lyme disease.

Newby, an individual who together with her husband were bitten by ticks and subsequently developed Lyme disease, investigated Burgdorger, bio-weapons research, and tick disease. Her disease led to debilitating symptoms, which were never seriously treated by her specialist physicians but eventually were treated with several courses of antibiotics enabling her to recover. Her early work led to a documentary explaining how Lyme disease is not a simple infection that is easily treated as the infectious disease society has claimed. The interviews she had with Burgdorfer, examination of his hundreds of papers, interviews with major Lyme disease investigators from the universities and the CDC over six years led her to hypothesize that the bio-weapons program was responsible for unleashing a new tick-borne pathogen responsible for the devastating disease that Lyme disease and its co-infections has become. She suspects it is the Rickettsial organism termed the Swiss agent. In 2016 a newspaper investigative report made the case that Lyme disease may be caused by an unknown pathogen developed by the military during secret bio-weapon testing. Unfortunately, the research done by Ft. Dietrick remains classified and the papers documenting the Swiss agent are hidden. No whistleblower has stepped forward. Burgdorger, who passed away several years ago, informed Newby that the full story has not been disclosed but it’s real.

Should we consider the Swiss agent Rickettsial organism as the cause of our Lyme disease woes? Moreover, rather than conceptualizing a tick bite as Lyme disease with co-infections, should we be rethinking a tick bite as a rickettsial infection with Lyme disease co-infection?

Cover Story: World-Class Athlete Gabby Reece

There are a great many endurance and performance sports that I have never participated in. Iron-man competitions and deep-water cave diving come to mind as do mountain climbing and back country helicopter skiing. But before one engages in extreme sports, an athlete trains hard for lengthy periods of time, often in adverse conditions, out in the elements, in the dark, deprived of sleep, not necessarily eating well, under deadline, often when physically or mentally not functioning well, and while injured. For Gabby Reece, a star volleyball player, such routines led to injury after injury to her knee. Despite numerous approaches to repair and rehabilitate it, she ultimately required a total knee replacement. Yes, she did try protein-rich plasma (PRP), physical therapies, acupuncture, laser, muscular work, nutritional supplementation, and more; but, unfortunately, the knee degeneration was too advanced and so she had surgery. The good news is that she has adapted to the prosthetic knee well and she is now engaged in high performance athletics as well as optimized training and instruction.

How does Reece do it? Karina Gordon interviews her in the cover article for the February/March issue focusing on women’s health. Gabby contends that training involves both physical as well as mental regimens. As her husband puts it, the folks in the gym need to do yoga and those doing yoga need to go to the gym. She likes to do “dynamic and explosive” workouts in the pool—one of the routines she instructs her students involves lifting weights under water. For Gabby, water serves important roles in any training program; she likes using the sauna and cold-water baths. Why use prescription pain medication when magnesium and turmeric help to reduce inflammation and acupuncture abates muscle soreness? Reece is impressed with the importance of deep breathing, particular nasal breathing and meditation. Why not run on grass to experience grounding? For nutrition, make sure the food consumed adds to one’s cellular repair process rather than burdening the system with high glycogen carbohydrates. And at the end of the day take a moment to reflect and acknowledge the physical workout accomplished.

Gary Huber, DO, on Progesterone Hormone Replacement

An issue featuring women’s health would not be complete without some discussion about hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Many of us have made such treatment a primary part of our practice and have done considerable study of HRT. Nevertheless, mastering one’s understanding of hormone physiology and replacement should be subject to refinement and reconsideration especially if our thinking has missed or ignored some important science. Gary Huber, DO, who has devoted much of his practice to studying the literature regarding hormone replacement therapy, finds that there is considerable misunderstanding regarding progesterone therapy. His article in this issue examines those myths, facts, and solutions.

Myth number one in endocrinology and gynecology is that progestins, such as Provera®, and compounded progesterone are the same. Most integrative physicians know that this is not true, but the same is not the case about the use of oral versus topical progesterone. Unfortunately, gut and liver metabolism of oral progesterone converts it into different “pregnanes,” which do not offer the same level of cancer protection for endometrial and breast tissue as progesterone itself. Topical progesterone circulates through the body establishing high tissue levels in endometrium and breast affording excellent anti-cancer effect. Huber also challenges the notion that we can prescribe estrogen replacement for most of the month but only offer progesterone for the final third or half. As estrogen does exert pro-carcinogenic activity might it not be appropriate to administer progesterone concurrently with the estradiol? Huber graciously offers his own teaching resources for those wanting additional information and training.

Richard Moskowitz, MD, on Homeopathy

If you have been following the news, homeopathy has been facing a blistering rebuke worldwide over the past decade. England upended its long-standing utilization of homeopathic medicine by its National Health Service in the past year. In similar fashion numerous European medical societies have debased homeopathic prescribing. Australia and Russia have followed suit. (India remains steadfast in supporting homeopathic medicine.) Not to be left out, the US Food and Drug Administration has been under pressure to ban homeopathic medication and over-the-counter supplementation. In October, the FDA announced its intentions to begin regulation of homeopathic products. Despite the fact that homeopathy is recognized to be infinitesimally low-dosed, the FDA wants to base homeopathic safety on allopathic drug dosing. Homeopathic nosodes are generally not prepared from infectious materials or biological toxins, yet they may be outlawed despite the fact that there is no measurable toxin. Homeopathic opium has long been prohibited.

In this issue Richard Moskowitz, MD, makes the case for homeopathy. As Moskowitz states, “the fact that homeopathy is based on a phenomenon as yet unexplained…is far from proving that the phenomenon doesn’t exist…It almost embarrasses me to have to point out the entire argument of those who make a point of ridiculing it still boils down to the same defective syllogism that even the eminent Dr. Holmes couldn’t improve upon: “Homeopathy can’t possibly work; therefore, it doesn’t work!”

For those who find themselves stuck with this logic, I would highly recommend reading Moskowitz’s article. His reasoning is exactly what we need to express when we encounter the homeopathic skeptic.

Jonathan Collin, MD