LAB 257
MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
Part 1
The Outbreaks
1
The Lyme Connection
Dear Ann,
Have you ever heard of Lyme disease? I am writing this letter
because I know you can help thousands of people by warning them
about this awful sickness. I have been battling it for 18 months.
Frankly I am not doing well.
It would be impossible for me to describe the emotional and
physical pain that I have been through. I am a 42-year-old man,
married nearly 20 years, and have a family. The days of slinging a
100-pound sack of bird-seed over my shoulder and walking to the
backyard are over.
Today I can’t even lift a five-pound sack of flour. There was a
time when I could play nine musical instruments. I sang in the
church choir and ran my own small business. Today, I do none of
the above. I am saving all my energy to fight Lyme disease.
The treatment costs are staggering. IV antibiotic therapy runs
from $150 to $475 a treatment. . . . We have already taken out a
third mortgage on our home. Had I been aware of the symptoms
from the beginning, I could have had $15 worth of oral antibiotics
and that would have done the job.
Thank you, Ann, for allowing me to try to help others.
—S.J.N., Mattituck, N.Y.
Protecting a nuclear power plant is no small task. When it opened in
the 1980s, the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island’s
North Shore boasted a 175-man militia equipped with Uzi 9-millimeters,
4 Michael Christopher Carroll
AR-15 assault rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns. This elite paramilitary unit
patrolled the “protected area,” a dense forest hundreds of acres deep that
buffered the “controlled area,” a huge concrete dome sheltering the uranium nuclear reactor. Every eight hours, a fresh detachment of fifty men,
armed to the teeth and clad in steel-toed boots, tan pants, and khaki shirts,
marched in lockstep through the protected area along dirt paths and
through marshes, their watchful eyes and ears continually scanning for
intruders. One Shoreham security officer, a short, blond-bearded, barrel chested man, remembers the scene during the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift in
October 1987. His platoon had just moved out, marching into a field where
they often spotted herds of thirty or forty wild deer darting ahead of them
into the wooded glen. He felt a brief pinch on his left ankle and thought it
was the stiff new Army boots he was breaking in. Later that night, he went
home and showered. Pulling off his white tube socks, he noticed a small red
mark on his ankle. Those damn boots, he thought, and went to bed.
When he awoke the next morning, the nagging blister had grown, so he
grabbed tweezers from the bathroom vanity and poked at the area. Suddenly, something started to move, and he realized it wasn’t a blister at all. It
was a live bug. Panicked, he frantically dug into it. As he extracted the critter, it broke in two, spilling its insides into the microscopic holes it punched
into his body.
Seventy-two hours later, he thought he had caught the flu. Within a
week, his joints began to ache.
Most people don’t think of deer as swimmers. But swim they do.
Indigenous to most of the United States and Canada, white-tailed
deer can swim distances as long as four miles.
Their natural predators—wolf, bear, mountain lion, and coyote—are
long extinct from the northeastern landscape, but one tiny foe remains.
Poised atop a blade of grass, the deer tick waits patiently for anything
warm-blooded to brush by, feeding on deer as well as smaller creatures like
birds and mice. The tick jumps aboard and pierces its sharp mouth hooks
into the skin of its unlucky host. A tiny glutton with a king-sized appetite,
the tick sucks the blood of its host in a feast that can last up to two whole
days, while it swells to a bubble over three times its original size. At the
same time, the little parasite deposits its own fluids into the host, fluids that
sometimes prove fatal.
The feeding habits of ticks and the swimming abilities of deer were of little concern to the residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in July 1975. This
quaint New England town is, for the most part, an upper-crust community
with tree-lined streets and fine colonial and Federal-style homes. As one of America’s oldest towns, founded by English Puritans, Old Lyme was enjoying its tricentennial as the nation prepared for a bicentennial. But a strange set
of occurrences that year would forever change its reputation from a warm,
charming enclave to a place of fear and despair.
Old Lyme, nestled on the banks of the Connecticut River, sits just a
shade north of the Long Island Sound. The midsummer weather in 1975 was
typical for coastal Connecticut—hot, sticky, and humid. As little ones frolicked in the sun, ignoring the blistering heat, and grown-ups sought refuge
on their porches by night, grateful for a balmy summer breeze, Polly Murray and Judith Mensch noticed something unusual about their children.
Seemingly out of nowhere, they were showing signs of strange physical and
mental ailments. Alarmed, the two mothers quickly phoned their neighbors,
who were observing strikingly similar conditions in their own children.
Many of the kids in the neighborhood—and some adults—were suffering
from the same skin rashes, throbbing headaches, and painful swollen joints.
Together, Polly and Judith brought their concerns to the Connecticut
Department of Health, which immediately appointed physicians from Yale
University to investigate. Initially, the doctors misdiagnosed thirty-nine
children and twelve adults with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition
they named “Lyme arthritis,” after the town where the strange outbreak
occurred. Two years later, scientists linked Lyme arthritis to the bite of a
deer tick. And in 1981, Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, a researcher at the National
Institutes of Health, discovered a thin spiral bacteria—in technical terms, a
spirochete—immersed in the fluid of a deer tick. He proved that the new
spirochete was to blame—not for a Lyme arthritis, but for an entirely new
ailment: Lyme disease.
Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), named in honor of its discoverer, attacks
humans in a number of ways, which is one reason why it remains difficult to
diagnose. Characterized by symptoms such as facial paralysis and stiff
swelling in the neck and joints, Bb also causes maladies like meningitis and
encephalitis—both swellings of the brain—and cardiac problems, including
atrioventricular block, myopericarditis, and cardiomegaly. Because Bb attacks
the body’s central nervous system, additional symptoms of Lyme disease
include acute headaches, general fatigue, fever, moodiness, and depression.
That brief pinch the nuclear power plant trooper felt on his ankle that
afternoon was the bite of an enemy no larger than the period at the end of
this sentence. The chance of finding something that size, even had it attached
to his exposed forearm, was pretty slim. The foe was either a eight-legged
nymph deer tick or a Lone Star tick, swelling up to one hundred times its size
with his blood. And while it sipped away, the tick regurgitated hundreds of
spiral-shaped Bb bacteria into the victim’s blood.
The tick is the perfect germ vector, which is why it has long been fancied as a germ weapon by early biowarriors from Nazi Germany and the
Empire of Japan to the Soviet Union and the United States. Fixing its target
by sensing exhaled carbon dioxide, the creature grabs onto a mammal’s skin
with its legs and digs in with its mouth hooks. The tick secretes saliva that
helps glue it to its host, making it difficult to separate. A special hormone in
the tick counteracts antibodies sent by the host to fight it off, and the crafty
tick secretes an anti-inflammatory to prevent itching—so the host hardly
knows it’s there.
If the tick is the perfect germ messenger, then Bb is an incredibly clever
germ. Because its outside wall is hard to destroy, the bacterium can fight off
immune responses and antibiotic drugs. Bb finds a home in the mouth and
salivary glands of larvae and nymph ticks, and infects females’ ovaries and
the thousands of eggs they will lay after breeding while attached to deer
(upon which Bb has little effect). Common in mice and birds as well, today
there are five subspecies of Bb and over one hundred mutated substrains in
the United States.
The question that experts haven’t been able to answer is why this disease
suddenly surfaced in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the summer of 1975.
PROJECT PAPERCLIP
MEETS PLUM ISLAND
“I do not believe that we should offer any guarantees to protection
in the post-hostilities period to Germans.... Among them may be
some who should properly be tried for war crimes or at least
arrested for active participation in Nazi activities. . . .”
—PRESIDENT FRANKLIN
DELANO ROOSEVELT (1944)
“To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.”
—U.S. SENATOR WILLIAM
L. MARCY (1832)
Dr. C. A. Mitchell began his remarks at the 1956 Plum Island dedication day by reminiscing on the late world war:
I often think and almost tremble at what could have taken place
had our Teutonic enemies been more alive to this. It is said that
some of their scientists pointed out the advantages to be obtained
from the artificial sowing of disease agents that attack domestic
animals. Fortunately blunders existed in the Teutonic camp as in
our own. Consequently, this means of attack was looked upon as
a scientific poppy dream. . . . If [as much] time and money were
invested in biologic agent dispersion as in one bomber plane, the
Free World would have almost certainly gone down to defeat.
The audience murmured in acknowledgment, but one dedication day VIP
stirred uncomfortably—the director of the new virus laboratory in Tübingen, West Germany, personally invited by Plum Island Director Maurice S.
“Doc” Shahan. The mind of the brown-haired man with the scar on his face
and upper lip held a dark secret. He sat there perspiring, staring at Dr.
Mitchell through his gray-brown eyes, wondering how many people knew
his past.
For he—Dr. Erich Traub—was that “Teutonic enemy.”
Strangely enough, he had every right to be there. He was one of Plum
Island’s founding fathers.
Nearing the end of World War II, the United States and the Soviet
Union raced to recruit German scientists for postwar purposes.
Under a top-secret program code-named Project PAPERCLIP, the U.S. military pursued Nazi scientistific talent “like forbidden fruit,” bringing them
to America under employment contracts and offering them full U.S. citizenship. The recruits were supposed to be nominal participants in Nazi
activities. But the zealous military recruited more than two thousand scientists, many of whom had dark Nazi party pasts.1
1
The best known PAPERCLIP recruit was Wernher von Braun, the brains behind the Saturn V rocket that
brought the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon, the visionary architect of Disneyland’s fabled Tomorrowland exhibit, one of the founders of NASA, and the fatherly host of network television specials on outer
space. The American public knew him as a warm, affable man with a thick German accent. They didn’t
know that the U.S. missile program was based upon von Braun’s revolutionary V-2 rocket he designed for
Hitler, a 50-foot-long, 13-ton intercontinental ballistic missile. And they didn’t know that during World
War II, von Braun was a major in Heinrich Himmler’s SS, and that his V-1 and V-2 rockets—built by some
20,000 slave laborers in his Mittlewerk SS munitions factory—rained destruction upon Europe in Hitler’s
futile attempt to turn the tide near the end of the war.
American scientists viewed these Germans as peers, and quickly forgot they were on opposite sides of a ghastly global war in which millions
perished. Fearing brutal retaliation from the Soviets for the Nazis’ vicious
treatment of them, some scientists cooperated with the Americans to earn
amnesty. Others played the two nations off each other to get the best
financial deal in exchange for their services. Dr. Erich Traub was trapped
on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain after the war, and ordered to
research germ warfare viruses for the Russians. He pulled off a daring
escape with his family to West Berlin in 1949. Applying for Project PAPERCLIP employment, Traub affirmed he wanted to “do scientific work in the
U.S.A., become an American citizen, and be protected from Russian
reprisals.”
As lab chief of Insel Riems—a secret Nazi biological warfare laboratory on a crescent-shaped island nestled in the Baltic Sea—Traub worked directly for Adolf Hitler’s second-in-charge, SS Reichsführer Heinrich
Himmler, on live germ trials. He packaged weaponized foot-and-mouth
disease virus, which was dispersed from a Luftwaffe bomber onto cattle
and reindeer in occupied Russia. At Himmler’s request, Traub personally
journeyed to the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There, amid the lush Anatolian
terrain, he searched for a lethal strain of rinderpest virus for use against the
Allies. Earlier in the war he had been a captain in the German Army, working as an expert on infectious animal diseases, particularly in horses. His
veterinary corps led the germ warfare attacks on horses in the United States
and Romania in World War I with a bacteria called glanders. He was also a
member of NSKK, the Nazi Motorists Corps, a powerful Nazi organization that ranked directly behind the SA (Storm Troopers) and the SS
(Elite Corps). In fact, NSKK’s first member, joining in April 1930, was
Adolf Hitler himself. Traub also listed his 1930s membership in America Deutscher Volksbund, a German-American “club” also known as Camp Siegfried. Just thirty miles west of Plum Island in Yaphank, Long Island,
Camp Sigfried was the national headquarters of the American Nazi movement. Over forty thousand people throughout the New York region
arrived by train, bus, and car to participate in Nuremberg-like rallies. Each
weekend they marched in lockstep divisions, carrying swastika flags, burning Jewish U.S. congressmen in effigy, and singing anti-Semitic songs.
Above all, they solemnly pledged their allegiance to Hitler and the Third
Reich.
Ironically, Traub spent the prewar period of his scientific career on a
fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, perfecting
his skills in viruses and bacteria under the tutelage of American experts
before returning to Nazi Germany on the eve of war. Despite Traub’s troubling war record, the U.S. Navy recruited him for its scientific designs, and
stationed him at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.2
2 Another PAPERCLIP recruit who worked alongside Traub at the Naval Medical Research Institute was Theodur Benzinger, an “aviation doctor.” Benzinger was invited by Heinrich Himmler to view a film on high-altitude simulations at Dachau using prisoners as human guinea pigs (a “37-year-old Jew in good condition who lasted 30 minutes—he began to perspire, wriggle his head, developed cramps, became breathless, and [with] foam collecting around his mouth became unconscious and died”). Arrested for war crimes by Nuremberg prosecutors, he denied experimenting with any prisoners. He evaded prosecution at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and rushed into the waiting arms of Project PAPERCLIP.
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.3
3
According to the document, a transcript of the meeting was prepared by the CIA. When I requested the
transcript under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA informed me that no such report ever existed,
and if it did, it would be withheld for reasons of national security
Traub’s detailed explanation of the secret operation on Insel Riems, and his
activities there during the war and for the Soviets, laid the groundwork for
Fort Detrick’s offshore germ warfare animal disease lab on Plum Island.
Traub was a founding father.
Little is publicly available about his clandestine activities for the U.S.
military. The names of two studies, “Experiments with Chick Embryo
Adapted Foot-and-mouth Disease” and “Studies on In-vitro Multiplication of Newcastle Disease Virus in Chicken Blood,” were made available
under the Freedom of Information Act, but the research reports themselves
(and many others) were withheld. With his “laboratory assistant” Anne
Burger, who came over in 1951, Traub experimented with over forty lethal
viruses on large test animals.4
4 Linda Hunt, author of Secret Agenda, the seminal book on Project PAPERCLIP, believes Burger may not have been Traub’s “assistant,” but rather his mistress. Apparently other PAPERCLIP recruits had imported their mistresses from Germany along with their families when they came to America. No additional information is available to the public on Anne Burger.
Traub also spent time at the USDA laboratories in Beltsville, Maryland, where he isolated a new weapons-grade virus strain in the USDA lab.
Studying a virulent strain of a new virus that caused human infections,
Traub showed how it adapted “neuro tropically” in humans by voraciously
attacking nerve and brain tissues. This was the same potent virus that
infected a human in Plum Island’s first-ever germ experiment one year
later.
By 1953, West Germany recognized a need for its own Insel Riems and
built a high-containment virus facility in Tübingen. They asked Dr. Erich
Traub to return to the Fatherland and assume command. Permission was
granted. But there was a catch. “In view of Dr. Traub’s eminence as an
international authority and the recognizable military potentialities in the
possible application of his specialty, it is recommended that future surveillance in appropriate measure be maintained after the specialist’s return to
Germany.” In other words, the CIA would be tailing him for years. As soon as the lab opened for business, he turned to Plum Island for starter
strains of viruses, which were gladly shipped over. USDA officials traveled
to West Germany and visited his laboratory often.
ERICH TRAUB AND PLUM ISLAND
Everybody seemed willing to forget about Erich Traub’s dirty past—that he
had played a crucial role in the Nazis’ “Cancer Research Program,” the
cover name for their biological warfare program, and that he worked
directly under SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. They seemed willing to
overlook that Traub in the 1930s faithfully attended Camp Siegfried. In fact,
the USDA liked him so much, it glossed over his dubious past and offered
him the top scientist job at the new Plum Island laboratory—not once, but
twice. Just months after the 1952 public hearings on selecting Plum Island,
Doc Shahan dialed Dr. Traub at the naval laboratory to discuss plans for
establishing the germ laboratory and a position on Plum Island.
Six years later—and only two years after Traub squirmed in his seat at
the Plum Island dedication ceremonies—senior scientist Dr. Jacob Traum
retired. The USDA needed someone of “outstanding caliber, with a long
established reputation, internationally as well as nationally,” to fill Dr.
Traum’s shoes. But somehow it couldn’t find a suitable American. “As a last
resort it is now proposed that a foreigner be employed.” The aggies’
choice? Erich Traub, who was in their view “the most desirable candidate
from any source.” The 1958 secret USDA memorandum “Justification for
Employment of Dr. Erich Traub” conveniently omitted his World War II
activities; but it did emphasize that “his originality, scientific abilities, and
general competence as an investigator” were developed at the Rockefeller
Institute in New Jersey in the 1930's. [Just in case anyone was wondering where they developed sick f%#k's back in the day,hell mostly likely still turning out their share DC]
The letters supporting Traub to lead Plum Island came in from fellow
Plum Island founders. “I hope that every effort will be made to get him. He
has had long and productive experience in both prewar and postwar Germany,” said Dr. William Hagan, dean of the Cornell University veterinary
school, carefully dispensing with his wartime activities. The final word
came from his dear American friend and old Rockefeller Institute boss Dr.
Richard Shope, who described Traub as “careful, skillful, productive, and
very original” and “one of this world’s most outstanding virologists.”
Shope’s sole reference to Traub at war: “During the war he was in Germany
serving in the German Army.”
Declining the USDA’s offer, Traub continued his directorship of the
Tübingen laboratory in West Germany, though he visited Plum Island frequently. In 1960, he was forced to resign as Tübingen’s director under a
dark cloud of financial embezzlement. Traub continued sporadic lab
research for another three years, and then left Tübingen for good—a scandalous end to a checkered career. In the late 1970s, the esteemed virologist
Dr. Robert Shope, on business in Munich, paid his father Richard’s old
Rockefeller Institute disciple a visit. The germ warrior had been in early
retirement for about a decade by then. “I had dinner with Traub one day—
out of old time’s sake—and he was a pretty defeated man by then.” On May
18, 1985, the Nazis’ virus warrior Dr. Erich Traub died unexpectedly in his
sleep in West Germany. He was seventy-eight years old.
A biological warfare mercenary who worked under three flags—Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States—Traub was never investigated for war crimes. He escaped any inquiry into his wartime past. The
full extent of his sordid endeavors went with him to his grave.
While America brought a handful of Nazi war criminals to justice, it
safeguarded many others in exchange for verses to the new state religion—
modern science and espionage. Records detailing a fraction of Erich Traub’s
activities are now available to the public, but most are withheld by Army
intelligence and the CIA on grounds of national security. But there’s
enough of a glimpse to draw quite a sketch.
☣ ☣ ☣
"I
began to feel like a man made out of glass, like someone hit me with a
baseball bat and shattered me from the top of my head to the balls of my
feet,” the nuclear power plant guard recalls. “Never in my life had I experienced such pain.” His hands gnarled into contortions, and his vocal cords
weakened and then became paralyzed, rendering him mute. The left side of
his body went numb. A rheumatologist misdiagnosed him—just like doctors misdiagnosed the children of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975—with
rheumatoid arthritis. Then, the neurological symptoms set in. He experienced violent mood swings where he would be calm one moment and bawling silly the next. A newfound sensitivity to light made him a prisoner in his
home, with the shades drawn and lights turned off. Noise was magnified a
hundredfold, to the point that the vibrations from a person walking across
the floor were excruciating. His incessant reflexive coughing was so powerful, it broke three of his ribs and brought up large globs of blood. When he
told the doctor he suspected he had the long-misunderstood ailment Lyme
disease, the doctor laughed. But with the help of his wife, a registered nurse,
he diagnosed himself with thirty-eight of the forty symptoms of Lyme.
Results showed he had some of the highest known titers of Borrelia
burgdorferi (Bb) known in New York State. He was ordered to a hospital
bed for intensive intravenous antibiotic treatment. The treatments for Lyme
disease, which can range from oral antibiotics to massive weekly IV infusions, are like “trying to put out a forest fire with a watering can,” according to another sufferer.
The symptoms subsided six months after the tick bite, but came back
with new fury five months later. More IV antibiotics were prescribed. “I
remember sitting in my doctor’s office and saying, ‘Doc, you know, I think
I’m losing my mind.’ ” His heart, trying to cope with the large doses of
chemicals, was failing him, but he figured he had nothing more to lose. He
was dying. Teetering on the edge, the security guard mustered up what little strength he had left for one last hope. A deeply religious man, active in
his church as a lay minister for some twenty-five years, he turned to a
higher power.
“I could no longer speak. As the joint pain became unbearable, this one
finger hurt so much I wanted it amputated—and I asked the doctor to
amputate it. I prayed to God, ‘How do you expect me to preach when I
can’t speak?’ and He said, ‘You have a typewriter—type.’ And I had one
crummy finger left that I could move, it was the little finger on my left hand
and I’m right-handed.” He began to pinkie-type, letter by letter, click-clack-click, whatever came to mind. In the very first sentence he punched
the I key too hard and it broke off and fell on the floor. “Forty years old,
and I began to cry like a baby—and no sound came out.” He finished the
letter, carefully penciling in the I’s. “It was the most humble letter I have
ever written in my life.” He did not think anyone would even read the
pathetic-looking half-typed, half-scrawled epistle. But plucking Steven J.
Nostrum’s letter out of the thousands she received each day, the nationally
syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers not only read it—she printed it.
What happened next was completely unexpected. Nostrum received
hundreds of phone calls and thousands of letters from Lyme disease sufferers
and their family members who shared his pain. “People were actually calling
up telephone operators to get the exchange for Mattituck, randomly dialing
numbers beginning with 298 and asking, ‘Is there a man in your town with
the initials S.J.N. who’s involved with Lyme disease?’ ” Buoyed by the overwhelming response, he began to heal himself by helping others. He set up a
makeshift command center in the basement of his home. Nostrum started
one of the nation’s first Lyme disease support groups; guests from around the
country came to his monthly gatherings at the local library. Through his organization, the Lyme Borrelia Out-Reach Foundation (Lyme Borrelia is the
technical name of Lyme disease), he published a newsletter, sent out audiotapes, distributed literature, and hosted a monthly cable television program
seen across the country. He spoke at civic associations, churches, and schools,
and testified before a special U.S. Senate committee on Lyme disease.
“I’ve been involved in Christian ministry for thirty-seven years—and
I’m not going to tell you I saw a burning bush,” says Nostrum. “But I can
look you square in the eye and tell you I felt a real calling to get the information out, no political agendas, strictly from a point of education and
prevention.” Nostrum’s education would lead him into some surprising
territory.
Attorney John Loftus was hired in 1979 by the Office of Special Investigations, a unit set up by the Justice Department to expose Nazi war
crimes and unearth Nazis hiding in the United States. Given top-secret
clearance to review files that had been sealed for thirty-five years, Loftus
found a treasure trove of information on America’s postwar Nazi recruiting. In 1982, publicly challenging the government’s complacency with the
wrongdoing, he told 60 Minutes that top Nazi officers had been protected
and harbored in America by the CIA and the State Department.
“They got the Emmy Award,” Loftus wrote. “My family got the death
threats.”
Old spies reached out to him after the publication of his book, The
Belarus Secret, encouraged that he—unlike other authors—submitted his
manuscript to the government, agreeing to censor portions to protect
national security. The spooks gave him copies of secret documents and told
him stories of clandestine operations. From these leads, Loftus ferreted out
the dubious Nazi past of Austrian president and U.N. secretary general
Kurt Waldheim. Loftus revealed that during World War II, Waldheim had
been an officer in a German Army unit that committed atrocities in Yugoslavia.5 A disgraced Kurt Waldheim faded from the international scene soon
thereafter.
5 The Office of Special Investigations found that Waldheim participated in the transfer of civilians to SS slave labor camps, the deportation of civilians to death camps, the use of anti-Semitic propaganda, and the mistreatment and execution of Allied POWs.
In the preface of The Belarus Secret, Loftus laid out a striking piece of
information gleaned from his spy network:
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 1950s.... 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.
Erich Traub had been working for the American biological warfare
program from his 1949 Soviet escape until 1953. We know he consulted
with Fort Detrick scientists and CIA operatives; that he worked for the
USDA for a brief stint; and that he spoke regularly with Plum Island director Doc Shahan in 1952. Traub can be physically placed on Plum Island at
least three times—on dedication day in 1956 and two visits, once in 1957
and again in the spring of 1958. Shahan, who enforced an ultra strict policy
against outside visitors, each time received special clearance from the State
Department to allow Traub on Plum Island soil.
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 1950s.
Preposterous as it sounds, clandestine outdoor germ warfare trials
were almost routine during this period. In 1952, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
called for a “vigorous, well-planned, large-scale [biological warfare] test
program... with all interested agencies participating.” A top-secret letter
to the secretary of defense later that year stated, “Steps should be taken to
make certain adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground, Fort Terry (Plum Island) and an island
field testing area.” Was Plum Island the island field testing area? Indeed,
when the Army first scouted Plum Island for its Cold War designs, they
charted wind speeds and direction and found that, much to their liking, the
prevailing winds blew out to sea.
One of the participating “interested agencies” was the USDA, which
admittedly set up large plots of land throughout the Midwest for airborne
anticrop germ spray tests. Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division ran
“vulnerability tests” in which operatives walked around Washington, D.C.,
and San Francisco with suitcases holding Serratia marcescens—a bacteria
recommended to Fort Detrick by Traub’s nominal supervisor, Nazi germ
czar and Nuremberg defendant Dr. Kurt Blome. Tiny perforations allowed
the germs’ release so they could trace the flow of the germs through airports and bus terminals. Shortly thereafter, eleven elderly men and women
checked into hospitals with never-before-seen Serratia marcescens infections. One patient died. Decades later when the germ tests were disclosed,
the Army denied responsibility. A Department of Defense report later
admitted the germ was “an opportunistic pathogen... causing infections of
the endocardium, blood, wounds, and urinary and respiratory tracts.” In
the summer of 1966, Special Operations men walked into three New York
City subway stations and tossed lightbulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis, a
benign bacteria, onto the tracks. The subway trains pushed the germs
through the entire system and theoretically killed over a million passengers.
Lab 257 15
Tests were also run with live, virulent, anti-animal germ agents. Two hog/cholera bombs were exploded at an altitude of 1,500 feet over pigpens set
up at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. And turkey feathers laced with Newcastle disease virus were dropped on animals grazing on a University of
Wisconsin farm.6
6 Traub likely developed the standardized Newcastle disease virus placed on the biological cluster bomb by concentrating the germ in chicken blood while he was working at the Naval Medical Research Institute for Project PAPERCLIP.
The Army never fully withdrew its germ warfare efforts against food animals. Two years after the Army gave Plum Island to the USDA—and three years after it told President Eisenhower it had ended all biological warfare against food animals—the Joint Chiefs advised that “research on anti-animal agent-munition combinations should” continue, as well as “field testing of anti-food agent munition combinations. . . .” In November 1957, military intelligence examined the elimination of the food supply of the Sino-Soviet Bloc, right down to the calories required for victory:
In order to have a crippling effect on the economy of the USSR, the food and animal crop resources of the USSR would have to be damaged within a single growing season to the extent necessary to reduce the present average daily caloric intake from 2,800 calories to 1,400 calories; i.e., the starvation level. Reduction of food resources to this level, if maintained for twelve months, would produce 20 percent fatalities, and would decrease manual labor performance by 95 percent and clerical and light labor performance by 80 percent.
At least six outdoor stockyard tests occurred in 1964–65. Simulants were sprayed into stockyards in Fort Worth, Kansas City, St. Paul, Sioux Falls, and Omaha in tests determining how much foot-and-mouth disease virus would be required to destroy the food supply.
Had the Army commandeered Plum Island for an outdoor trial? Maybe the USDA lent a hand with the trial, as it had done out west by furnishing the large test fields. After all, the Plum Island agreement between the Army and the USDA allowed the Army to borrow the island from the USDA when necessary and in the national interest.
Traub might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. “They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks,” and a picture he once saw “shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.” Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de rigueur for Erich Traub.
Somebody gave Steve Nostrum a copy of John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret at one of his support group meetings. Steve had long suspected that Plum Island played a role in the evolution of Lyme disease, given the nature of its business and its proximity to Old Lyme, Connecticut. But he never publicly voiced the hunch, fearing a loss of credibility; hard facts and statistics earned him a reputation as a leader in the Lyme disease field. Now, in his hands, he had a book written by a Justice Department attorney who not only had appeared on 60 Minutes but also had brought down the secretary general of the United Nations. Nostrum disclosed the possible Plum–Lyme connection on his own television show. He invited local news reporter and Plum Island ombudsman Karl Grossman to help him explore the possibilities in light of the island’s biological mishaps. Asked why he wrote about Loftus’s book in his weekly newspaper column, Grossman says, “To let the theory rise or fall. To let the public consider it. And it seemed to me that the author was a Nazi hunter and a reputable attorney— this was not trivial information provided by some unreliable person.”
In October 1995, Nostrum, fresh off nursing duty (having earned an RN degree to help Lyme disease patients), rushed to a rare public meeting held by the USDA. In a white nurse’s coat, stethoscope still around his neck, Nostrum rose. Trembling, his blond beard now streaked with gray, he clutched his copy of The Belarus Secret as he read the damning passage out loud for the USDA and the public to hear. “I don’t know whether this is true,” he said, looking at the dais. “If it is true, there must be an investigation—if it’s not true, then John Loftus needs to be prosecuted.” People in the audience clapped, and some were astonished. A few gawked, thinking he was nuts. How did the USDA officials react? “If stares could kill, I would have been dead,” remembers Nostrum.
Hiding behind the same aloof veil of secrecy they had employed for decades, the USDA brazenly cut him off. “There are those who think that little green men are hiding out there,” the officials responded to Nostrum. “But trust us when we say there are no space aliens and no five-legged cows.” A few laughs erupted in the crowd. “It did nothing but detract from what I was saying,” says Nostrum. “But I said it, and I had the documentation to support it.”
One person the USDA couldn’t laugh off as easily was Congressman
Michael Forbes. A concerned Forbes called newsman Karl Grossman
after reading his column. “He gets hold of me late one night,” says Grossman, “and tells me he’s going to make a surprise visit—a raid on Plum
Island—the very next morning.” He wanted Grossman (and the power of
his pen) to come along for the ride.
At 6:45 a.m. on a crisp, clear spring morning, just days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Forbes walked up to the ferry captain at Orient Point flanked by Grossman and John McDonald, an investigative reporter from Newsday. “Hi, I’m Congressman Mike Forbes.”
The captain’s response was one of “pure fear.” He radioed over all kinds of distress calls to Plum Island. Waiting impatiently on the gangplank, Forbes was in no mood to fool around. He repeated, “Look, I’m Congressman Forbes and I’m going on this ferry.” Minutes later, he was riding on the ferry with the two journalists. The self-invited guests were hurried onto the bus and whisked into the office of new Plum Island Director Dr. Harley Moon. Dr. Moon had been recruited from the USDA’s Ames, Iowa laboratory, which studies less dangerous germs domestic to the United States. Though he had no interest in relocating to New York, he agreed to temporarily help move Plum Island past the troubles of past administrations before returning to his native Iowa. Forbes, who had never been on Plum Island before, immediately began peppering Moon with questions that revealed extensive homework. Nostrum had briefed Forbes beforehand and given him a list of questions, first of which was the Plum–Lyme connection unearthed in John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret.
“Forbes wanted to get to the bottom of a bunch of issues,” remembers Grossman. “Like the hurricane—the electricity going out in that hurricane years before. And all the stuff about Plum Island and biological warfare. A real laundry list of things.
“They were very nervous. Very nervous. There were no PR guys around. It was just these scientists—and no spin. Moon had six or seven scientists come in and explain what they were doing. Forbes was in no mood to be snowed or soft-balled. To bullshit him would have been difficult. Meanwhile, McDonald and I were shooting questions at them, too. It was their worst nightmare.”
Forbes then asked Dr. Moon about the allegations in The Belarus Secret.
“There is a great concern about the prevalence of Lyme disease on eastern Long Island,” Mike Forbes said, winding up. “And here we have the highest incidence of it in the world.”
Dr. Moon replied to the inquiries with half-apologies. “I’m sorry, Congressman, I wasn’t here then”—“I don’t know, Congressman”—“We don’t have any paperwork on that”—“I can’t say what the Department of Defense might have been doing before Agriculture came here.” Factually, the answers were all true. After all, how would Harley Moon know about outdoor tick trials in the 1950s? Dr. Moon had been on Plum Island two months (he’d only be there for ten more, before assuming an endowed research chair at Iowa State University). And if there were documents on Plum Island that addressed it, they were long gone, thanks to the recently ordered destruction of Central Files. Moon enjoyed complete plausible deniability.
“I agree with you that it looks like there’s more of an incidence here of Lyme disease,” said Moon, “but that might be due to improvements in diagnosis.”
“Above all,” Director Moon said to the trio on their way out, “do no harm—that’s the first principle. Is it risky doing research on foreign animal diseases? I can’t say there is no time, no way, a virus can get out of here. The possibility is so small—we take a calculated risk. And the risk-benefit ratio says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
Forbes was visibly perturbed on the ferry ride back to Long Island. The surprise visit hadn’t yielded a smoking gun. Not finding what he was looking for, he left behind a long, detailed letter demanding answers. But the aggressive congressman and the two gumshoes had forewarned them. Dangers still lurked on Plum Island—Forbes was certain of it. “As long as I’m a member of Congress,” he promised he would watch over the island like a hawk.
The Geography. You can pinpoint cases of Lyme disease on a map of the United States by drawing a circle around the area of largest infection. Now you can tighten that circle until a single point is reached. That point? Plum Island. Spokes radiate outward from this point and pass through neighborhoods boasting the highest rates of Lyme disease contamination in the nation.
The Vectors. In the 1950s, the cocking of a rifle was often heard on Plum Island, portending the demise of deer that swam from the mainland to forage. Over time, fewer rifle shots were heard as the numbers of deer swimming to and fro increased, collecting ticks along the way. And while deer were sporadically shot, there was no stopping the wild birds. Retired scientists Jim and Carol House have been “birding” on Plum Island for over twenty years now, never missing an Audubon Society Christmas bird count, where they scout the terrain with binoculars, scribbling notes and snapping pictures. “Plum Island has a unique bird life,” says Jim House. “It’s got purple sandpipers, harlequin ducks, robins, eiders, osprey, warblers, and woodcocks,” says Carol. Plum even hosts golden and bald eagles, who come in and dine on the baby Canadian geese. “It’s one of their favorite stops in the springtime.” There’s no short supply of bald eagle food, because massive flocks of Canadian geese rule the island in droves. “We call them the Canadian Air Force,” says one worker. “We made a list of a hundred and forty different species,” says Carol. “One time I counted over two hundred brown creepers.” The American Museum of Natural History runs a wild bird colony on seventeen-acre Great Gull Island, just east of Plum Island, and no doubt that has something to do with the plethora of fowl.
Plum Island, an untrammeled plot of wild nature, lies in the middle of
the Atlantic flyway, the bird migration highway that runs between breeding
grounds and winter homes from the Caribbean to the Florida coast, up the
East Coast to the icy reaches of Greenland.
Plum Island breeders like Canadian geese, osprey, and seagulls nest on the island and make local trips to Connecticut and Long Island. Hundreds of thousands more, in all shapes and sizes, also gather on Plum Island, resting before crossing the Sound in the spring and flying along the Connecticut River valley toward Maine and Nova Scotia. Take swallows, for example. “One day you’d see a couple on the telephone wire,” says Carol, “and then ten the next day, and then all of the sudden you’d see a hundred, then nothing. They’ll wait until they get this critical mass, then go.” Exactly where they settle is up to wind conditions at the time, which is often their first landfall.
That first landfall is Long Island and the Hamptons to the south and west, and coastal Connecticut, including Old Lyme, to the north. When the birds aren’t migrating, they constantly travel locally between Long Island, Plum Island, and Connecticut for food and companionship. Thanks to all of this bird activity, Plum Island presents more vectors for the spread of infectious disease spread than perhaps anywhere else. Ticks have a long and varied menu: droves of small foraging birds (ticks find baby chicks irresistible), a tantalizing wild deer habitat, and thousands of mice and rats for tick larvae and nymphs to feed on. Plum Island is a Lyme disease tinderbox.
Because the wildlife vectors are beyond control, safety at Plum Island has to be controlled from the inside out. The only way, then, for Plum Island to be 100 percent fail-safe is to keep the biological blood samples and germs dormant, sealed and padlocked inside laboratory freezers.
But for the lab to do its work, these same germs have to be taken out, thawed, and uncorked on lab benches. And that’s where the vulnerability begins, as Dr. Moon pointed out.
“Let’s face it,” Plum Island scientist Dr. Douglas Gregg once said to a reporter, “there can be no absolute guarantee of securing the island.”
The Theories. Attempts by the scientific community to explain the origin of Lyme disease are far from convincing. One popular theory holds that ticks always had Bb bacteria—germs similar to Bb existed in Europe and Asia for three hundred years—and infections are the result of the human-altered habitat in which the pests live. A century ago, goes the theory, there were far fewer woods in the United States, and deer were near extinct. Because of the modern conservation movement, forests replaced farmlands and populations of deer, birds, and small animals surged. In this environment, ticks multiplied. Suburban developments did the same. As Dr. Ralph Tierno reasons, “By the mid-1970s, human beings’ collective behavior had created circumstances that so favored the spread of Lyme disease that sooner or later it was bound to attract people’s notice and demand a protective response.... We made our own sickbed and then we had to lie in it.”
This theory assumes that Lyme disease was a gradual problem that “attracted attention.” Nothing is further from the truth. What occurred in Old Lyme in 1975 was the outbreak of an unknown illness, concentrated within a defined geographic location that infected thirty-nine children and twelve adults. It was a modest epidemic. Old Lyme’s outbreak was a footprint of something that had deposited itself there and festered. Lyme disease cannot simply be ascribed to poor land-use patterns, when ten miles south of Old Lyme lies an untamed island teeming with ticks, birds, deer, and mice, hosting two high-hazard germ laboratories proven to be anything but reliable in containing foreign germs.
White-tailed deer often swim across Plum Gut, the two-mile-wide strait that separates Plum Island from Long Island. Countless birds— including seagulls, Canadian geese, and osprey—fly between coastal Connecticut, Long Island, and Plum Island. Old Lyme lies directly in the flight vector of birds that congregate on Plum Island and migrate north and south along the East Coast. When biological security was taken seriously in the early 1950s, deer were shot on sight by trained snipers. Even puppies and dogs, fatefully setting their paws on the island’s beaches with their owners, would be euthanized. By 1975, germs on Plum Island increased in both numbers and virulence—but safety and security measures moved in the opposite direction.
Tests were supposed to be held in airtight laboratory rooms. Instead, internal government documents prove there were gaping holes in the lab roofs where air currents and insects freely came and went, depending upon the direction of the wind. What’s more, the animals were held in outdoor pens, where they were injected with virus vaccines and fed out of open-air feeding troughs. Plum Island workers witnessed birds flying in and out of the pens, picking morsels from the troughs. Wild animals were shooed away, but not before birds swooped down and mingled with the test animals. One eyewitness reported seeing deer entering the animal pens to feed.
If Dr. Traub continued his outdoor germ experiments with the Army and experimented with ticks outdoors, the ticks would have made contact with mice, deer, and more than 140 species of wild birds known to frequent and nest on Plum Island. The birds spread their toxic cargo to resting and nesting perches atop the great elms and oaks of Old Lyme and elsewhere, just like they spread the West Nile virus throughout the United States.
Researchers trying to prove that Lyme disease existed before 1975 claim to have isolated Bb in ticks collected on nearby Shelter Island and Long Island in the late 1940s. That timing coincides with both Erich Traub’s arrival in the United States on Project PAPERCLIP and the Army’s selection of Plum Island as its offshore biological warfare laboratory.
The USDA’s spokesperson, Sandy Miller Hays, is unconvinced about the possibility of a link between Lyme disease and Plum Island:
Lyme disease—well, the positive agent for Lyme disease was identified in 1948, which was about six years before Plum Island came into being. So then some people blame the Army. There is a part of me that says, “Let me get this straight, the U.S. Army, that had saved the world, came along after the war and said, ‘Let’s poison a bunch of ticks and turn them loose on people in Connecticut?’ ”
We kind of giggle around here about the stories, but some of them are just outlandish. I always laugh about Nazi scientists....
Do you want to hear about how [scientists] are keeping a cow from drooling or do you want to hear about poisoned ticks and the Nazi scientists? It’s always more fun to tell those scary stories.
A PR expert, Hays had Scientific American eating out of her hand in June 2000, when they reported her as saying, “ ‘We still get asked about the Nazi scientists,’... [with] the slightest trace of weariness creeping into her voice.” In their feature story on Plum Island, the prestigious magazine dubbed the intrigue surrounding the island as a “fanciful fictional tapestry.”
But as much as Ms. Hays and Scientific American might like to laugh or shrug it off, hard facts are indeed facts: the Army and the USDA conducted numerous outdoor biological warfare experiments within United States borders; the Army and the USDA were cooperating in a germ warfare laboratory built on Plum Island; the U.S. recruited the key architect of Nazi Germany’s germ warfare program who worked directly for Heinrich Himmler; after Fort Detrick and the CIA interrogated him, the Nazi scientist developed the idea to build Plum Island, modeled after his own germ warfare lab on Insel Riems; the USDA borrowed this Nazi scientist to work in its Washington, D.C.–area laboratories; and this very Nazi scientist is now confirmed to have been on Plum Island on at least three occasions.
These aren’t “fictional tapestries” or “scary stories”—they are scary facts from which conclusions can and should be drawn.
While the Army and the USDA are quick to deny the Plum Island tick experiments ever occurred, every few years the public learns of a top-secret germ warfare test whose existence the U.S. government had long denied. Consider this 2002 Pentagon disclosure in the New York Times about a 1964 test:
The Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors in cold-war era experiments to test the Navy’s vulnerability to toxic warfare, the Pentagon said today. Six tests were carried out... hundreds of sailors were exposed to poisons . . . in some of the experiments, known as Project SHIPBOARD HAZARD, or SHAD. Of the six tests, three used sarin, a nerve agent, or VX, a nerve gas [agents used by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against his own people]; Lab 257 23 one used staphylococcal enterotoxin B, known as SEB, a biological toxin; one used a stimulant [Serratia marcescens] believed to be harmless but subsequently found to be dangerous... 4,300 military personnel [were] identified as participants in Project SHAD.
“Plum Island experimented with ticks,” he says, adding, “but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony, where you take them and feed them on the virus, and breed the ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until it’s diluted. Recently, they reinstated the tick colony.”
Tick colony?
Journalist Karl Grossman pressed a Plum Island lab chief some years ago about John Loftus’s claims in The Belarus Secret. “My impression is that there is no truth to this,” said Dr. Charles Mebus. But like director Harley Moon, Mebus had not been there in the 1950s to form an “impression.” He did tell the roving reporter what he knew firsthand: Plum Island previously worked on—and continued to work on—tick experiments on “soft ticks” that transmitted heartwater, bluetongue, and African swine fever viruses, but aren’t normally known for spreading the Bb bacteria. But that wasn’t the complete picture.
The lab chief failed to mention that Plum Island also worked on “hard ticks,” a crucial distinction. A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled “African Swine Fever” notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, “the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus.” In laymen’s terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick—feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs—during the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb to researchers or to the island’s vectors. The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick’s habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas.
Entomologist Dr. Richard Endris joined Plum Island in 1981 to spearhead increased tick research. Endris and the African swine fever team leader, Dr. William Hess, went to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on tick-hunting safaris. They stuck their arms deep inside burrows and were occasionally bitten by snakes and rats. They searched out wild warthog burrows in the brush using a “tick sucker”—a reversed leaf-blower with attached sieves and filters—to strain hundreds of tick specimens out of the moist sand. They set out little blocks of dry ice thirty feet apart and watched the ticks march to the smoking lumps (the carbon dioxide attracted them, fooling the ticks into thinking it was the exhale of mammalian hosts). Endris constructed two high-hazard “insectories,” insect labs, one in the back corner of Laboratory 101 and another in the basement. Each insectary was equipped with sand-filled climate chamber incubators with lighting that simulated photoperiods, protective rims around the airlock doors covered in sticky glue, and seals across all windows and drains. The ticks were fed on the blood of hairless suckling baby mice, where they would attach and molt and breed. All told, he reared over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species.7 Endris handled the tiny parasites with extreme care, using fine art brushes to move the minute nymphs into a transfer container—a urine specimen cup and a screen, glued together with globs of plaster of Paris. To test the ticks, the scientists first anesthetized diseased pigs, goats, mice, and calves, then placed the ticks on the sleeping animals. The ticks immediately attached and dug their mouth parts in. After a few hours of feeding, technicians detached the ticks with soft-tip forceps.
7 Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leishmaniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken.
Endris set up quite an impressive tick colony when he arrived in 1981. But there was substantial earlier tick research. Dr. Hess’s tick experiments in the 1960s and ’70s with the Lone Star tick and others were conducted in unsafe conditions. Endris said the early tick research wasn’t focused: “Plum Island was not set up to deal with ticks at all.” In 1980, a Plum Island scientific oversight committee urged the USDA to hire “an appropriately trained medical entomologist,” calling it a “priority item.” The consultants also “strongly recommended” the construction of “a modern, approved insectary be undertaken for future research.”8 The advisers had serious concerns with the primitive tick colony then in operation under the veterinarian Dr. Hess, who had been with Plum Island since 1953.
8 Italics are added.
Dr. Endris and his boss, Hess, were both fired in 1988 by incoming director Dr. Roger Breeze, who promptly closed down their precious tick labs. They wrapped up research, put the viruses back in the freezers, and dumped the ticks into the autoclave, which steamed them at over 100 degrees centigrade.9 Endris, who went to work for Merck Pharmaceutical, scoffs at a Plum Island–Lyme disease connection. “Those kind of comments... indicate a gross ignorance of Lyme disease.” Before being fired by Dr. Breeze, Endris served as the scientific member of Southampton’s Joint Lyme Disease Task Force, and says with conviction he never heard of any Lyme disease relationship.
9 “A good tick will last about one minute,” says Endris. “Any living biological protein will coagulate at that temperature.”
But Dr. Endris wasn’t on Plum Island in 1975; his entomology expertise and the “modern, approved” tick insectary he built were a full six years away. Unfortunately, Dr. Hess, who could shed light on the old tick experiments, died in 1999 in New Hampshire. It is clear, though, that he was proud of and cherished his thirty-five-year scientific career there—his family scattered his ashes in Plum Gut among the trade winds of Plum Island.
Dr. Garth Nicolson, a national expert on immune system disorders, isn’t satisfied with the ecological Lyme disease theory. “There’s a high possibility,” says Nicolson, who runs a California medical institute and has testified before Congress on Gulf War Syndrome, “that Lyme disease is a combination of infectious agents let loose from a laboratory, possibly from Plum Island by birds to the coast, causing multiple infections.” Nicolson contends Bb is often found in tandem with mycoplasma bacteria, which causes many of Lyme’s debilitating symptoms. Mycoplasmas found in foreign countries were studied on Plum Island since its inception; they may have been cross-contaminated with Bb and escaped the lab in the 1970s.
Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, who discovered the Lyme disease bacteria that bears his name, says, “The big question is where the ticks came from.” He believes that imported deer from Europe brought the deer tick species, and with it the bacteria, to America, where all three proliferated. I ask Dr. Burgdorfer about the Lyme disease connection to Plum Island. “Touching on something like that may cause a hell of a lot of problems,” he says. “You have to show a development in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems impossible—
“Unless,” he continues, “they cultivated the tick species on Plum Island, and unknowingly fed some ticks on animals or humans and a Borrelia spirochete [bacteria] accrued.” Dr. Wally Burgdorfer isn’t ready to prove the link, but he’s quick to point to the proven track record that helps make the case: “Plum Island is proof of the existence of breaks in biological safety.” And of a proposed biosafety-level-four upgrade at Plum Island, the most dangerous, he admits, “Even if it’s biosafety level four [the highest containment level], that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
Where Bb came from is as important as where it’s gone. It exists in two thirds of all ticks found in the eastern United States, and the disease has appeared in forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Thirteen thousand new cases are diagnosed each year. Untold numbers of infections go undetected, because the red bull’s-eye ring—the infamous signature of Lyme disease—appears in only 60 to 80 percent of all cases. Some infections appear as red, orange, or purple rashes; some are oval in shape, others triangular, and still others are horizontal. Sometimes Bb infection doesn’t even cause a rash.
At any rate, the apparent epicenter of Lyme disease seems dubiously close, too coincidentally close to Plum Island, a place that has raised far too many questions for the Bb link to be dismissed along with the three-headed chicken and five-legged cow.
Thanks to advocates like Nostrum, the public has become aware of the debilitating ailment and how best to prevent it. He was the first to reject GlaxoSmithKline’s much-ballyhooed LYMErix, a genetically engineered Lyme disease vaccine that was pulled off the shelves in February 2002.10 Nostrum isn’t fully cured, either—you never can be. When he’s run down, fatigue and deep joint pain set in. He’ll never sing and play instruments again like he did back in the 1980s, when his quartet won a third place award from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. When he feels up to it, he spends evenings surf casting with his son, or stargazing from the telescope on his back porch. Most of all he likes to drive his car—New York State license plate MR LYME (his wife’s, MRS LYME)—over to the beach and quietly walk the rocky shore, collecting sand glass and seashells.
He watches flocks of birds fly overhead, he listens to their faint
squawks high up in the sky, gliding over the expanse of the Long Island
Sound, toward Connecticut—and toward the epicenter of the epidemic of
the strange bacteria that has claimed the better part of his life.
And he wonders.
McNamara had recently attended Plum Island’s foreign animal disease school, where vets were taught how to diagnose exotic disease outbreaks and respond. But when she dialed the emergency telephone number set up to report possible foreign animal diseases, she found the line disconnected. The program was presided over by new Plum Island acting director Dr. Lee Ann Thomas, who had recently replaced director Dr. Alfonso Torres, who had replaced director Dr. Harley Moon when he left to return to Iowa in 1996, who replaced director Dr. Roger Breeze. Since Dr. Breeze’s departure, there had been no continuity in the laboratory’s leadership. According to sources, no one wanted the job because Breeze pulled the lab’s strings from afar.
In the last few days of that August, Dr. Deborah Asnis, a specialist in infectious disease at a small Queens hospital, noticed an unusual pattern. Two and then four hospital patients, all elderly, contracted fevers with headaches, muscle weakness, and mental ailments that progressed into comas. A fifth patient came in a few days later with the same symptoms, and neighboring hospitals admitted three more strikingly similar cases. Each victim had recently spent time outdoors in the evenings, and lived near Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, a marshy mosquito breeding ground on the Long Island Sound. Testing blood samples and fluid from spinal taps, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) diagnosed the ailment as St. Louis encephalitis (SLE), a malady caused by a domestic arbovirus (a virus transmitted by airborne insects) found along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The pesky mosquito was suspected as the culprit. New York City immediately launched a massive $6 million aerial and ground pesticide campaign, spraying the pesticide malathion (a potent neurotoxin carcinogen) and distributing over 300,000 cans of DEET chemical insect repellant to city firehouses, which spawned a public fright of its own.
The determined forty-five-year-old McNamara kept calling other numbers until she reached someone, and sent her bird tissue samples to the USDA’s domestic animal disease laboratory in Ames, Iowa. A trained pathologist, McNamara knew that SLE would attack the zoo’s chickens; finding the chickens healthy, she suspected a different germ was sickening both her patients and Dr. Asnis human ones. She called the CDC and told them about her freezer full of dead birds and about a possible animal–human link. A CDC scientist brushed her off, offering to send samples. “You’re just dealing with some veterinary thing,” he uttered with contempt. McNamara later told Madeline Drexler, author of Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections, that she felt the CDC treated her like a “dingbat, premenopausal female veterinarian in New York City.” McNamara sent the CDC the virus samples anyway—infected tissues of a snowy owl, several rare Chilean flamingos, and a cormorant—but the agency paid them no mind.
McNamara then contacted the Army’s germ labs at Fort Detrick. They requested samples be sent right away. Because of her persistence, Fort Detrick was able to determine that the germ from bird and human samples was the same virus—the “West Nile virus,” a microbe never before seen in the Western Hemisphere.
The culprit spreading the virus was the same one that transmitted the Rift Valley fever virus and so many other deadly germs—the wily mosquito.
The public reacted with hysteria. Parents kept their children indoors. Television reporters blitzed viewers with neighborhood chemical spraying alerts and tips on avoiding the virus, which seemed to be affecting the elderly, young children, and those with weakened immune systems, such as patients undergoing cancer treatments. Officials in Greenwich, Connecticut, announced a 5:00 p.m. curfew on all outdoor activities. A story in The New Yorker by Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, the best-seller about the feared Ebola virus, helped stir the pot. He revealed that an Iraqi defector (Saddam Hussein’s body double) told sources that West Nile virus strains were part of Iraq’s biological warfare program. Worse, the virus strain isolated by Fort Detrick was found to be similar to strains held by the Russians. “It is really an epidemic,” said a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, a few weeks after the initial diagnosis. “And this outbreak is still growing.” By year’s end, sixty-two people had been confirmed infected and five more died, raising the death toll to seven.
First discovered amid the swampy banks of the Nile River in Uganda in 1937, West Nile virus has increased its dominion far and wide in America, reaching forty-three states (as far west as Montana) via birds and mosquitoes. The casualties had shrunk to twenty-one infections and two deaths in 2000, but that was deceptive. Spreading with newfound fury in 2002, West Nile boasted 4,156 confirmed cases and 284 deaths in the United States. There were 329 cases in Louisiana alone, where the mosquito is half jokingly referred to as the state bird. Illinois topped all states with 884 confirmed infections and 64 deaths. An all-out chemical pesticide attack was waged from airplanes, pickup trucks, and handheld sprayers hopscotching from backyard to backyard.
News reporters interviewed doctors, who sought to play down the threat. During one recent NBC Nightly News segment, a doctor stressed that “only those over sixty are at risk.” Another state health official said, “The chances of being infected are very, very minimal. . . . It’s certainly nothing to be alarmed about.” But there appears to be an increasing number of infections in children, and West Nile virus strains are now attacking younger adults—such as a fifty-three-year-old otherwise healthy man. However, even if the scourge preyed only upon senior citizens, that still amounts to some thirty-two million men and women, one out of every eight Americans. And they aren’t just numbers—they are people’s parents, children’s grandparents, and America’s “Greatest Generation.” They are people like seventy-two-year-old Ernest Hunt from Louisiana, who succumbed three weeks after being bit by a mosquito while he and his wife, Becky, were enjoying a lakefront Fourth of July barbecue with family and friends. It is now a risk for people to tend to their gardens and take evening walks during the summer months, because the West Nile virus is lurking— everywhere.
By Labor Day 2003, over 5,000 human infections had been reported, and 95 deaths. The CDC predicted another 100 people would die by the end of the year. It is now estimated that since the initial August 1999 outbreak, 200,000 people have been exposed to the West Nile virus. The death toll is approaching 400 and rising. There is no known cure or human vaccine.
Though a few researchers rule out the possibility that the West Nile virus outbreak was a bioterrorism attack waged by an unknown enemy, most likely Iraq, others aren’t so sure. “Of course it could have been easily intentionally introduced,” says one scientist familiar with bioterrorism. “Saddam Hussein had worked on it and threatened us with it. All someone had to do was come into JFK Airport with a inconspicuously small bottle of twenty or so infected mosquitoes, and go to the Bronx Zoo or to Flushing Bay and let them loose.” The scientist rejects the conventional airplane theory because he says not one of the infected persons in 1999 was an airline passenger arriving from a foreign country.
Other than hypotheticals like these, the scientific community is at a loss to identify the origin of the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak.
For all their postulating, none of the seasoned virus hunters looked to New York–area germ laboratories. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Health said frankly, “It has not been on the top of our to-do list.” The director of the CDC, James Hughes, said as interesting as the question of how was to entertain, “the answer may remain elusive— Mother Nature does not always reveal her secrets.”
But was it Mother Nature’s secret to keep?
The West Nile outbreak brings to light the kinship between animal and human virus diseases. It illustrates how zoonotic viruses like West Nile fever, Rift Valley fever, Ebola fever, anthrax, and influenza move easily between animals and humans to achieve devastating results. For example, horses, like humans, are particularly susceptible to West Nile fever virus. What the public doesn’t know is that at the same exact time that humans in Queens were dying, dead horses were being quietly carted off Long Island farms to Plum Island. Where the El Al commercial jet scenario falls short is where the plight of the horses begins.
While Dr. McNamara tended to her Bronx Zoo bird flock and Dr. Asnis cared for her Queens patients, horse farm owners seventy-five miles east were placing frantic phone calls to Dr. John Andresen at the Mattituck-Laurel Veterinary Hospital. Owners of thirteen North Fork farms on the east end of Long Island phoned and each call sounded the same: their cherished horses were losing all sense of motor coordination. The horses’ hindlegs were buckling, and they were stumbling, neighing, twitching, and convulsing. “It was a mystery,” recalled Andresen, who normally received four horse-related phone calls in a year—not thirteen in a week. Going out to investigate, he found “neurological cases, which are uncommon in an equine practice.” One horse had collapsed in the stable, thrashing, unable to right himself on his legs. “It was in bad shape,” Dr. Andresen recalled. The poor stallion expired before Andresen could give its owner his prognosis. Alarmed by the rife similarities, he contacted New York State’s head veterinarian, Dr. John Huntley, who in turn called in the USDA’s emergency response team. It wasn’t the first time this virus SWAT team had descended upon Long Island’s North Fork; an earlier team spearheaded an investigation into a 1978 virus outbreak on Plum Island.
By August 26—just three days after Dr. Asnis phoned in her alert to the New York City Health Department—a strange disease was confirmed in eighteen cases on thirteen horse farms, all in the North Fork hamlets of Riverhead, Jamesport, and Mattituck. Ten horses died, either on their own or by lethal injection to ease their misery. Expert epidemiologists flew in from Kentucky, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and met with Dr. Andersen to get the lay of the land. The team collected samples from 146 horses in the area and found that an alarming 25 percent of them tested positive for West Nile virus. Each farm visited had large pools of standing water in watering areas, ripe for mosquito transmission.
All of the infections occurred in a five-mile radius. The epicenter of these mysterious horse deaths was less than twenty miles away from a faulty exotic virus disease laboratory.
Of all the counties polled in the New York City metropolitan area in 1999, Suffolk County’s dead bird and infected mosquito counts were among the highest recorded. The story of the horses raises even greater suspicions. Infection records from the last few years indicate how West Nile virus spread. In 2000, there were 60 cases and 20 deaths in seven states. In 2001, 738 confirmed cases and 156 deaths occurred in 20 states. In the outbreak year, 1999, records charted all equines in New York, Connecticut, and Maryland (the range of the West Nile virus outbreak by the end of its first year) into account—horses, ponies, mules, burros, and donkeys. Strikingly, none of the 271,000 equines tested positive for the West Nile virus, with one exception—Long Island’s North Fork.1 The simultaneous equine outbreak of this zoonotic virus, with the human outbreak occurring over seventy-five miles away, reveals that the ground zero of the West Nile virus outbreak was the North Fork peninsula opposite Plum Island, not JFK International Airport in New York City.
1 Two horses that tested positive for West Nile virus were stabled at Belmont Park racetrack in Nassau County, Long Island, west of the North Fork, which lies in Suffolk County. These horses were purportedly shipped from Suffolk.
Many of the stable owners bred and sold horses to make a living, so
they were glad to keep the exotic virus infections in their stables a secret. As
the emergency team finished its work that August, the USDA quietly gathered the horse carcasses from the stables. From the eighteen horses, they
gathered pints of blood, spinal tap fluid, even whole brain hemispheres, and
carefully whisked them to the Plum Island ferry. On Plum Island, a pathologist performed a necropsy (animal autopsy) on the carcasses, and the brain
tissues were sliced up and examined under the microscope. Clinical signs
were recorded; samples apportioned, sealed, labeled, and refrigerated; and
the horse remains went down the chute to the incinerator charging room.
If Plum Island was uninterested in West Nile virus in the past, it seems to have acquired a taste for the germ. In October 1999, on the heels of the outbreak, Lab 101 held four healthy Equus caballus, the common domestic horse. They were given intravenous injections of a West Nile virus strain obtained from Dr. McNamara’s Bronx Zoo collection of frozen infected birds. Each day, as the horses progressively sickened, animal handlers examined them. The scientists noted that the virus was not detectable in the blood until thirty days post infection, but occurred within forty-five days; all four succumbed. Autopsies were performed, and four new “horse adapted” virus strains were extracted for the Plum Island virus library. If West Nile virus is not detectable in horses for thirty days, that means the North Fork horses became infected with the virus bug in July of 1999, and perhaps earlier.
This all begs the question: did Plum Island have West Nile fever virus at the time of the outbreak? Dr. Robert Shope’s Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) across Long Island Sound held twenty-seven different strains of West Nile virus in its New Haven, Connecticut, freezers until 1995, when he moved to the University of Texas and took his strains with him. YARU and Plum Island often trafficked in viruses, most notably the dangerous Rift Valley fever virus in 1977. Had Dr. Shope shared West Nile virus reference samples with his friend Plum Island director Dr. Roger Breeze—the island laboratory being the only official location where foreign animal germs like West Nile virus are supposed to be studied? When I ask him, former Plum Island director Jerry Callis says he didn’t think it was in the virus repository in August 1999. “I never thought it was important enough. It’s more of a mild virus, not among the serious animal virus diseases,” he says, even though it appears fatal to birds. But Callis had left Plum Island in 1987 when Dr. Breeze came in. USDA official Wilda Martinez confirmed Dr. Callis’s beliefs when she assured the public that West Nile wasn’t studied there prior to the outbreak—but she declined to say whether the virus was in their freezers.
Former Plum Island scientist Jim House, a Cornell classmate of Dr. Andresen, thinks West Nile samples existed prior to 1999. “There were samples there, and it wasn’t answered clearly to the public. They didn’t honestly tell how many samples they had and that’s when people started to get upset.” It is certainly difficult to believe that the facility boasting the world’s largest collection of animal viruses would not have the West Nile fever virus, especially given the fact that right across Long Island Sound, YARU had no less than twenty-seven strains of the germ. Too, the North Fork horse epidemic is a footprint; and the cluster of horse stables, a most inviting first rest stop for mosquitoes and birds carrying the virus and working their way west from Plum Island, down the narrow strip of the North Fork. The USDA dispatched an emergency team to Long Island to examine how many horses were infected and on which horse farms. Yet they never turned their magnifying glasses on themselves. Had the fox been guarding the henhouse?
Martinez told the New York Post in 1999 that “top security [at Plum Island] does not mean top-secret.” But my requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act for a catalog of germs contained in the Plum Island virus library went denied on national security grounds.
In 1873, New York merchants Ed McGrath and James Palmer imported white Pekin ducks from China for American food consumption. The winding creeks, kettle-hole ponds, and sandy soils of eastern Long Island were prime for duck farms. By the turn of the century, no less than thirty separate commercial flocks were raised on Long Island. At the industry’s height, eight million savory Pekins were consumed in the United States annually—and Long Island produced six and a half million of them. Pekin were reared on over seventy Long Island farms, “picked” at their necks with knives, plucked, packed six to a box, and stored in walk-in freezers to await shipment. Roasted, marinated “Long Island duck” recipes became a national fancy. The name endures to this day, but the Pekin ducks do not.
The thriving Long Island duck industry was dealt a sudden fatal blow in the winter of 1967. Scores of white breeders from three months to two years old died on three adjacent farms; other ducks were trembling, becoming listless, and unable to stand upright. Instead of gaily flapping and quacking, flocks quietly sat on the ground, wings outstretched and heads down, clinical signs of physical weakness and depression. Whatever the ailment, it was highly contagious. It soon killed off well over half the flocks. The USDA swept in and took charge, ordering some six thousand ducks immediately poisoned and over fifty thousand eggs destroyed, costing local duck farmers millions of dollars. The infection was found to be the virus that caused Dutch duck plague (also called duck virus enteritis), an avian disease endemic to Holland, Belgium, India, and China. It was the first outbreak of this foreign animal disease within the United States. Two independent animal doctors who discovered the outbreak postulated how it occurred:
The detection of the disease on the American Continent invites some explanation as to origin. Had the disease been present for some time and remained undetected? Was the disease imported . . . ? Was it introduced indirectly by traffic in infected material...? The possibility seems remote that the disease had been present on Long Island for any length of time. In the long history of the intensive duck industry on Long Island, the disease had been neither suspected nor reported.
One farm employed Dutch farmworkers and entertained Dutch tourists, but they were dubious of that connection. “It is difficult or impossible to evaluate the importance of such traffic.” They were at a loss to explain such an explosive virus infection. No evidence could be found that Plum Island scientists investigated the nearby site of the outbreak, or whether they investigated a possible link between the island laboratory and the outbreak. But the USDA pamphlet “DUCK VIRUS ENTERITIS: An old world disease . . . in the new world” maintained, “In spite of careful investigations, the source of the original U.S. outbreak has not been determined.”
Three years later, the USDA announced a complete eradication of the virus. The department showered the Long Island duck farmers with awards for the important role they played in the campaign. The Plum Island virus laboratory, coincidentally nearby, had developed a vaccine for the duck farms to protect against further incursion of this exotic virus. But the plaudits and awards rang terribly hollow. The farmers had essentially participated in two eradications—that of the duck virus and of their own livelihood. With the farmers’ flocks crippled by Dutch duck plague virus, Suffolk County—under strong pressure from Hamptons-area real estate interests—crushed the remaining farms. The majestic white ducks and their baby ducklings were now unwanted pests quacking and defecating in the ponds and creeks of the new Hamptons social set. Invoking “protection of the environment,” the government closed duck farms, family farms that for a century were the backbone of Long Island’s east end economy. “Prompt enforcement of control measures confined the outbreak to New York State,” crowed the pithy USDA pamphlet.
The USDA was wrong about its ballyhooed disease campaign results. A prescient article, buried deep within the New York Times on Christmas Eve 1967, hinted at what the future held: FATAL VIRUS FOUND IN WILD DUCKS ON LI. The tiny newsbrief reported that sixty wild black ducks were found dead in Flanders Bay, at the head of Long Island’s North and South forks. A Department of the Interior official admitted the discovery posed a “more dangerous” problem than the duck-farm outbreak. He was right. Wild waterfowl, whose travel is impossible to control, picked up the virus from the Long Island duck farms and spread it north and south along the North American flyway to geese, swans, blue-winged teals, and mallards. In 1970 and 1971, the virus infected birds throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland. By 1973, it reached the Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge in faraway South Dakota, where forty thousand mallards and Canadian geese died and had to be collected, piled into a mammoth heap, and set ablaze. The infection reached the Gulf of Mexico and Canada by 1975.
The virus continues to spread to this day.
After the infection at the three farms, two local veterinarians brought bird carcasses and tissue specimens to Plum Island to confirm the infection by Dutch duck plague. Just as they had during the West Nile virus outbreak years later, Plum Island officials told reporters there was no possible way their laboratory caused this outbreak, because they did not study the virus until after the outbreak occurred. However, it was they who first conducted “exhaustive” laboratory tests and confirmed the outbreak was a foreign duck virus, so it’s safe to say they had diagnostic agents to detect the virus and conceivably the virus itself in their stores. After all, they had to match the virus against something to make a positive identification. The results, said the Plum Island scientists of the new virus unleashed in their backyard, were “particularly interesting . . . in that they point out that duck plague virus infection is, in most probability, a new infection on Long Island. It appears that the virus was introduced from outside areas to the Suffolk County duck farms.” Could there have been a laboratory leak on the order of the government-acknowledged virus outbreak that occurred there a decade later? As early as 1970, Plum Island was again working on a strain of duck virus, and this one had infected a man suffering from infectious hepatitis virus. “The implications,” wrote the scientists of their research, “offer some unpleasant possibilities: first as a mode of introducing a serious avian disease into this country, and second as a possible source of new human viruses by recombination between [the duck virus] and human influenza.”
Today, vast tract-home developments and million-dollar Hamptons estates rise above the fields where sixty-four family-owned duck farms once proudly stood. Meanwhile, a few small duck farms on Long Island are left, eking out a meager existence. There are two reminders of the once grand Long Island duck industry: a twenty-foot-tall concrete duck, built by a farmer in 1931 to sell his ducks and eggs on the roadside, that now sits guarding the entrance to a county park, and the Long Island Ducks, a minor league baseball team established in 2000, its untactful name highlighting an extinct part of New York State’s heritage. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that nine out of ten Long Island Duck fans couldn’t explain the origin of their team’s name.
Like West Nile fever and Lyme disease, Dutch duck plague is an emerging disease in the United States that continues to spread with no end in sight. And like the other two, no one knows to this day how the duck virus entered into the United States and ravaged the duck farms of eastern Long Island.
Speaking of the vaccine they prepared for the collapsed Long Island duck industry in 1975—too late to be of any help to the farmers—Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said to a reporter, “You see, we do have an impact.”
As you read on, consider for yourself whether that assertion has merit.
6 Traub likely developed the standardized Newcastle disease virus placed on the biological cluster bomb by concentrating the germ in chicken blood while he was working at the Naval Medical Research Institute for Project PAPERCLIP.
The Army never fully withdrew its germ warfare efforts against food animals. Two years after the Army gave Plum Island to the USDA—and three years after it told President Eisenhower it had ended all biological warfare against food animals—the Joint Chiefs advised that “research on anti-animal agent-munition combinations should” continue, as well as “field testing of anti-food agent munition combinations. . . .” In November 1957, military intelligence examined the elimination of the food supply of the Sino-Soviet Bloc, right down to the calories required for victory:
In order to have a crippling effect on the economy of the USSR, the food and animal crop resources of the USSR would have to be damaged within a single growing season to the extent necessary to reduce the present average daily caloric intake from 2,800 calories to 1,400 calories; i.e., the starvation level. Reduction of food resources to this level, if maintained for twelve months, would produce 20 percent fatalities, and would decrease manual labor performance by 95 percent and clerical and light labor performance by 80 percent.
At least six outdoor stockyard tests occurred in 1964–65. Simulants were sprayed into stockyards in Fort Worth, Kansas City, St. Paul, Sioux Falls, and Omaha in tests determining how much foot-and-mouth disease virus would be required to destroy the food supply.
Had the Army commandeered Plum Island for an outdoor trial? Maybe the USDA lent a hand with the trial, as it had done out west by furnishing the large test fields. After all, the Plum Island agreement between the Army and the USDA allowed the Army to borrow the island from the USDA when necessary and in the national interest.
Traub might have monitored the tests. A source who worked on Plum Island in the 1950s recalls that animal handlers and a scientist released ticks outdoors on the island. “They called him the Nazi scientist, when they came in, in 1951—they were inoculating these ticks,” and a picture he once saw “shows the animal handler pointing to the area on Plum where they released the ticks.” Dr. Traub’s World War II handiwork consisted of aerial virus sprays developed on Insel Riems and tested over occupied Russia, and of field work for Heinrich Himmler in Turkey. Indeed, his colleagues conducted bug trials by dropping live beetles from planes. An outdoor tick trial would have been de rigueur for Erich Traub.
Somebody gave Steve Nostrum a copy of John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret at one of his support group meetings. Steve had long suspected that Plum Island played a role in the evolution of Lyme disease, given the nature of its business and its proximity to Old Lyme, Connecticut. But he never publicly voiced the hunch, fearing a loss of credibility; hard facts and statistics earned him a reputation as a leader in the Lyme disease field. Now, in his hands, he had a book written by a Justice Department attorney who not only had appeared on 60 Minutes but also had brought down the secretary general of the United Nations. Nostrum disclosed the possible Plum–Lyme connection on his own television show. He invited local news reporter and Plum Island ombudsman Karl Grossman to help him explore the possibilities in light of the island’s biological mishaps. Asked why he wrote about Loftus’s book in his weekly newspaper column, Grossman says, “To let the theory rise or fall. To let the public consider it. And it seemed to me that the author was a Nazi hunter and a reputable attorney— this was not trivial information provided by some unreliable person.”
In October 1995, Nostrum, fresh off nursing duty (having earned an RN degree to help Lyme disease patients), rushed to a rare public meeting held by the USDA. In a white nurse’s coat, stethoscope still around his neck, Nostrum rose. Trembling, his blond beard now streaked with gray, he clutched his copy of The Belarus Secret as he read the damning passage out loud for the USDA and the public to hear. “I don’t know whether this is true,” he said, looking at the dais. “If it is true, there must be an investigation—if it’s not true, then John Loftus needs to be prosecuted.” People in the audience clapped, and some were astonished. A few gawked, thinking he was nuts. How did the USDA officials react? “If stares could kill, I would have been dead,” remembers Nostrum.
Hiding behind the same aloof veil of secrecy they had employed for decades, the USDA brazenly cut him off. “There are those who think that little green men are hiding out there,” the officials responded to Nostrum. “But trust us when we say there are no space aliens and no five-legged cows.” A few laughs erupted in the crowd. “It did nothing but detract from what I was saying,” says Nostrum. “But I said it, and I had the documentation to support it.”
☣ ☣ ☣
At 6:45 a.m. on a crisp, clear spring morning, just days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Forbes walked up to the ferry captain at Orient Point flanked by Grossman and John McDonald, an investigative reporter from Newsday. “Hi, I’m Congressman Mike Forbes.”
The captain’s response was one of “pure fear.” He radioed over all kinds of distress calls to Plum Island. Waiting impatiently on the gangplank, Forbes was in no mood to fool around. He repeated, “Look, I’m Congressman Forbes and I’m going on this ferry.” Minutes later, he was riding on the ferry with the two journalists. The self-invited guests were hurried onto the bus and whisked into the office of new Plum Island Director Dr. Harley Moon. Dr. Moon had been recruited from the USDA’s Ames, Iowa laboratory, which studies less dangerous germs domestic to the United States. Though he had no interest in relocating to New York, he agreed to temporarily help move Plum Island past the troubles of past administrations before returning to his native Iowa. Forbes, who had never been on Plum Island before, immediately began peppering Moon with questions that revealed extensive homework. Nostrum had briefed Forbes beforehand and given him a list of questions, first of which was the Plum–Lyme connection unearthed in John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret.
“Forbes wanted to get to the bottom of a bunch of issues,” remembers Grossman. “Like the hurricane—the electricity going out in that hurricane years before. And all the stuff about Plum Island and biological warfare. A real laundry list of things.
“They were very nervous. Very nervous. There were no PR guys around. It was just these scientists—and no spin. Moon had six or seven scientists come in and explain what they were doing. Forbes was in no mood to be snowed or soft-balled. To bullshit him would have been difficult. Meanwhile, McDonald and I were shooting questions at them, too. It was their worst nightmare.”
Forbes then asked Dr. Moon about the allegations in The Belarus Secret.
“There is a great concern about the prevalence of Lyme disease on eastern Long Island,” Mike Forbes said, winding up. “And here we have the highest incidence of it in the world.”
Dr. Moon replied to the inquiries with half-apologies. “I’m sorry, Congressman, I wasn’t here then”—“I don’t know, Congressman”—“We don’t have any paperwork on that”—“I can’t say what the Department of Defense might have been doing before Agriculture came here.” Factually, the answers were all true. After all, how would Harley Moon know about outdoor tick trials in the 1950s? Dr. Moon had been on Plum Island two months (he’d only be there for ten more, before assuming an endowed research chair at Iowa State University). And if there were documents on Plum Island that addressed it, they were long gone, thanks to the recently ordered destruction of Central Files. Moon enjoyed complete plausible deniability.
“I agree with you that it looks like there’s more of an incidence here of Lyme disease,” said Moon, “but that might be due to improvements in diagnosis.”
“Above all,” Director Moon said to the trio on their way out, “do no harm—that’s the first principle. Is it risky doing research on foreign animal diseases? I can’t say there is no time, no way, a virus can get out of here. The possibility is so small—we take a calculated risk. And the risk-benefit ratio says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
Forbes was visibly perturbed on the ferry ride back to Long Island. The surprise visit hadn’t yielded a smoking gun. Not finding what he was looking for, he left behind a long, detailed letter demanding answers. But the aggressive congressman and the two gumshoes had forewarned them. Dangers still lurked on Plum Island—Forbes was certain of it. “As long as I’m a member of Congress,” he promised he would watch over the island like a hawk.
LYME ISLAND
By 1990, the east end of Long Island had, by leaps and bounds, the largest
incidence of Lyme disease in the nation. But why? The Geography. You can pinpoint cases of Lyme disease on a map of the United States by drawing a circle around the area of largest infection. Now you can tighten that circle until a single point is reached. That point? Plum Island. Spokes radiate outward from this point and pass through neighborhoods boasting the highest rates of Lyme disease contamination in the nation.
The Vectors. In the 1950s, the cocking of a rifle was often heard on Plum Island, portending the demise of deer that swam from the mainland to forage. Over time, fewer rifle shots were heard as the numbers of deer swimming to and fro increased, collecting ticks along the way. And while deer were sporadically shot, there was no stopping the wild birds. Retired scientists Jim and Carol House have been “birding” on Plum Island for over twenty years now, never missing an Audubon Society Christmas bird count, where they scout the terrain with binoculars, scribbling notes and snapping pictures. “Plum Island has a unique bird life,” says Jim House. “It’s got purple sandpipers, harlequin ducks, robins, eiders, osprey, warblers, and woodcocks,” says Carol. Plum even hosts golden and bald eagles, who come in and dine on the baby Canadian geese. “It’s one of their favorite stops in the springtime.” There’s no short supply of bald eagle food, because massive flocks of Canadian geese rule the island in droves. “We call them the Canadian Air Force,” says one worker. “We made a list of a hundred and forty different species,” says Carol. “One time I counted over two hundred brown creepers.” The American Museum of Natural History runs a wild bird colony on seventeen-acre Great Gull Island, just east of Plum Island, and no doubt that has something to do with the plethora of fowl.
Plum Island breeders like Canadian geese, osprey, and seagulls nest on the island and make local trips to Connecticut and Long Island. Hundreds of thousands more, in all shapes and sizes, also gather on Plum Island, resting before crossing the Sound in the spring and flying along the Connecticut River valley toward Maine and Nova Scotia. Take swallows, for example. “One day you’d see a couple on the telephone wire,” says Carol, “and then ten the next day, and then all of the sudden you’d see a hundred, then nothing. They’ll wait until they get this critical mass, then go.” Exactly where they settle is up to wind conditions at the time, which is often their first landfall.
That first landfall is Long Island and the Hamptons to the south and west, and coastal Connecticut, including Old Lyme, to the north. When the birds aren’t migrating, they constantly travel locally between Long Island, Plum Island, and Connecticut for food and companionship. Thanks to all of this bird activity, Plum Island presents more vectors for the spread of infectious disease spread than perhaps anywhere else. Ticks have a long and varied menu: droves of small foraging birds (ticks find baby chicks irresistible), a tantalizing wild deer habitat, and thousands of mice and rats for tick larvae and nymphs to feed on. Plum Island is a Lyme disease tinderbox.
Because the wildlife vectors are beyond control, safety at Plum Island has to be controlled from the inside out. The only way, then, for Plum Island to be 100 percent fail-safe is to keep the biological blood samples and germs dormant, sealed and padlocked inside laboratory freezers.
But for the lab to do its work, these same germs have to be taken out, thawed, and uncorked on lab benches. And that’s where the vulnerability begins, as Dr. Moon pointed out.
“Let’s face it,” Plum Island scientist Dr. Douglas Gregg once said to a reporter, “there can be no absolute guarantee of securing the island.”
The Theories. Attempts by the scientific community to explain the origin of Lyme disease are far from convincing. One popular theory holds that ticks always had Bb bacteria—germs similar to Bb existed in Europe and Asia for three hundred years—and infections are the result of the human-altered habitat in which the pests live. A century ago, goes the theory, there were far fewer woods in the United States, and deer were near extinct. Because of the modern conservation movement, forests replaced farmlands and populations of deer, birds, and small animals surged. In this environment, ticks multiplied. Suburban developments did the same. As Dr. Ralph Tierno reasons, “By the mid-1970s, human beings’ collective behavior had created circumstances that so favored the spread of Lyme disease that sooner or later it was bound to attract people’s notice and demand a protective response.... We made our own sickbed and then we had to lie in it.”
This theory assumes that Lyme disease was a gradual problem that “attracted attention.” Nothing is further from the truth. What occurred in Old Lyme in 1975 was the outbreak of an unknown illness, concentrated within a defined geographic location that infected thirty-nine children and twelve adults. It was a modest epidemic. Old Lyme’s outbreak was a footprint of something that had deposited itself there and festered. Lyme disease cannot simply be ascribed to poor land-use patterns, when ten miles south of Old Lyme lies an untamed island teeming with ticks, birds, deer, and mice, hosting two high-hazard germ laboratories proven to be anything but reliable in containing foreign germs.
White-tailed deer often swim across Plum Gut, the two-mile-wide strait that separates Plum Island from Long Island. Countless birds— including seagulls, Canadian geese, and osprey—fly between coastal Connecticut, Long Island, and Plum Island. Old Lyme lies directly in the flight vector of birds that congregate on Plum Island and migrate north and south along the East Coast. When biological security was taken seriously in the early 1950s, deer were shot on sight by trained snipers. Even puppies and dogs, fatefully setting their paws on the island’s beaches with their owners, would be euthanized. By 1975, germs on Plum Island increased in both numbers and virulence—but safety and security measures moved in the opposite direction.
Tests were supposed to be held in airtight laboratory rooms. Instead, internal government documents prove there were gaping holes in the lab roofs where air currents and insects freely came and went, depending upon the direction of the wind. What’s more, the animals were held in outdoor pens, where they were injected with virus vaccines and fed out of open-air feeding troughs. Plum Island workers witnessed birds flying in and out of the pens, picking morsels from the troughs. Wild animals were shooed away, but not before birds swooped down and mingled with the test animals. One eyewitness reported seeing deer entering the animal pens to feed.
If Dr. Traub continued his outdoor germ experiments with the Army and experimented with ticks outdoors, the ticks would have made contact with mice, deer, and more than 140 species of wild birds known to frequent and nest on Plum Island. The birds spread their toxic cargo to resting and nesting perches atop the great elms and oaks of Old Lyme and elsewhere, just like they spread the West Nile virus throughout the United States.
Researchers trying to prove that Lyme disease existed before 1975 claim to have isolated Bb in ticks collected on nearby Shelter Island and Long Island in the late 1940s. That timing coincides with both Erich Traub’s arrival in the United States on Project PAPERCLIP and the Army’s selection of Plum Island as its offshore biological warfare laboratory.
The USDA’s spokesperson, Sandy Miller Hays, is unconvinced about the possibility of a link between Lyme disease and Plum Island:
Lyme disease—well, the positive agent for Lyme disease was identified in 1948, which was about six years before Plum Island came into being. So then some people blame the Army. There is a part of me that says, “Let me get this straight, the U.S. Army, that had saved the world, came along after the war and said, ‘Let’s poison a bunch of ticks and turn them loose on people in Connecticut?’ ”
We kind of giggle around here about the stories, but some of them are just outlandish. I always laugh about Nazi scientists....
Do you want to hear about how [scientists] are keeping a cow from drooling or do you want to hear about poisoned ticks and the Nazi scientists? It’s always more fun to tell those scary stories.
A PR expert, Hays had Scientific American eating out of her hand in June 2000, when they reported her as saying, “ ‘We still get asked about the Nazi scientists,’... [with] the slightest trace of weariness creeping into her voice.” In their feature story on Plum Island, the prestigious magazine dubbed the intrigue surrounding the island as a “fanciful fictional tapestry.”
But as much as Ms. Hays and Scientific American might like to laugh or shrug it off, hard facts are indeed facts: the Army and the USDA conducted numerous outdoor biological warfare experiments within United States borders; the Army and the USDA were cooperating in a germ warfare laboratory built on Plum Island; the U.S. recruited the key architect of Nazi Germany’s germ warfare program who worked directly for Heinrich Himmler; after Fort Detrick and the CIA interrogated him, the Nazi scientist developed the idea to build Plum Island, modeled after his own germ warfare lab on Insel Riems; the USDA borrowed this Nazi scientist to work in its Washington, D.C.–area laboratories; and this very Nazi scientist is now confirmed to have been on Plum Island on at least three occasions.
These aren’t “fictional tapestries” or “scary stories”—they are scary facts from which conclusions can and should be drawn.
While the Army and the USDA are quick to deny the Plum Island tick experiments ever occurred, every few years the public learns of a top-secret germ warfare test whose existence the U.S. government had long denied. Consider this 2002 Pentagon disclosure in the New York Times about a 1964 test:
The Defense Department sprayed live nerve and biological agents on ships and sailors in cold-war era experiments to test the Navy’s vulnerability to toxic warfare, the Pentagon said today. Six tests were carried out... hundreds of sailors were exposed to poisons . . . in some of the experiments, known as Project SHIPBOARD HAZARD, or SHAD. Of the six tests, three used sarin, a nerve agent, or VX, a nerve gas [agents used by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against his own people]; Lab 257 23 one used staphylococcal enterotoxin B, known as SEB, a biological toxin; one used a stimulant [Serratia marcescens] believed to be harmless but subsequently found to be dangerous... 4,300 military personnel [were] identified as participants in Project SHAD.
PLAYING WITH FIRE
Former Plum Island Director Dr. Jerry Callis says the association between
Lyme disease and Plum Island is absurd. “Not now or ever had we anything to do with Lyme disease,” he says in measured impatience. “It’s
existed in Europe for years—I’ve had it three times.” Asked if Plum Island
ever worked with ticks on Plum Island, Dr. Callis gave a surprising answer. “Plum Island experimented with ticks,” he says, adding, “but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony, where you take them and feed them on the virus, and breed the ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until it’s diluted. Recently, they reinstated the tick colony.”
Tick colony?
Journalist Karl Grossman pressed a Plum Island lab chief some years ago about John Loftus’s claims in The Belarus Secret. “My impression is that there is no truth to this,” said Dr. Charles Mebus. But like director Harley Moon, Mebus had not been there in the 1950s to form an “impression.” He did tell the roving reporter what he knew firsthand: Plum Island previously worked on—and continued to work on—tick experiments on “soft ticks” that transmitted heartwater, bluetongue, and African swine fever viruses, but aren’t normally known for spreading the Bb bacteria. But that wasn’t the complete picture.
The lab chief failed to mention that Plum Island also worked on “hard ticks,” a crucial distinction. A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled “African Swine Fever” notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, “the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus.” In laymen’s terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick—feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs—during the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb to researchers or to the island’s vectors. The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick’s habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas.
Entomologist Dr. Richard Endris joined Plum Island in 1981 to spearhead increased tick research. Endris and the African swine fever team leader, Dr. William Hess, went to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on tick-hunting safaris. They stuck their arms deep inside burrows and were occasionally bitten by snakes and rats. They searched out wild warthog burrows in the brush using a “tick sucker”—a reversed leaf-blower with attached sieves and filters—to strain hundreds of tick specimens out of the moist sand. They set out little blocks of dry ice thirty feet apart and watched the ticks march to the smoking lumps (the carbon dioxide attracted them, fooling the ticks into thinking it was the exhale of mammalian hosts). Endris constructed two high-hazard “insectories,” insect labs, one in the back corner of Laboratory 101 and another in the basement. Each insectary was equipped with sand-filled climate chamber incubators with lighting that simulated photoperiods, protective rims around the airlock doors covered in sticky glue, and seals across all windows and drains. The ticks were fed on the blood of hairless suckling baby mice, where they would attach and molt and breed. All told, he reared over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species.7 Endris handled the tiny parasites with extreme care, using fine art brushes to move the minute nymphs into a transfer container—a urine specimen cup and a screen, glued together with globs of plaster of Paris. To test the ticks, the scientists first anesthetized diseased pigs, goats, mice, and calves, then placed the ticks on the sleeping animals. The ticks immediately attached and dug their mouth parts in. After a few hours of feeding, technicians detached the ticks with soft-tip forceps.
7 Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leishmaniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken.
Endris set up quite an impressive tick colony when he arrived in 1981. But there was substantial earlier tick research. Dr. Hess’s tick experiments in the 1960s and ’70s with the Lone Star tick and others were conducted in unsafe conditions. Endris said the early tick research wasn’t focused: “Plum Island was not set up to deal with ticks at all.” In 1980, a Plum Island scientific oversight committee urged the USDA to hire “an appropriately trained medical entomologist,” calling it a “priority item.” The consultants also “strongly recommended” the construction of “a modern, approved insectary be undertaken for future research.”8 The advisers had serious concerns with the primitive tick colony then in operation under the veterinarian Dr. Hess, who had been with Plum Island since 1953.
8 Italics are added.
Dr. Endris and his boss, Hess, were both fired in 1988 by incoming director Dr. Roger Breeze, who promptly closed down their precious tick labs. They wrapped up research, put the viruses back in the freezers, and dumped the ticks into the autoclave, which steamed them at over 100 degrees centigrade.9 Endris, who went to work for Merck Pharmaceutical, scoffs at a Plum Island–Lyme disease connection. “Those kind of comments... indicate a gross ignorance of Lyme disease.” Before being fired by Dr. Breeze, Endris served as the scientific member of Southampton’s Joint Lyme Disease Task Force, and says with conviction he never heard of any Lyme disease relationship.
9 “A good tick will last about one minute,” says Endris. “Any living biological protein will coagulate at that temperature.”
But Dr. Endris wasn’t on Plum Island in 1975; his entomology expertise and the “modern, approved” tick insectary he built were a full six years away. Unfortunately, Dr. Hess, who could shed light on the old tick experiments, died in 1999 in New Hampshire. It is clear, though, that he was proud of and cherished his thirty-five-year scientific career there—his family scattered his ashes in Plum Gut among the trade winds of Plum Island.
Dr. Garth Nicolson, a national expert on immune system disorders, isn’t satisfied with the ecological Lyme disease theory. “There’s a high possibility,” says Nicolson, who runs a California medical institute and has testified before Congress on Gulf War Syndrome, “that Lyme disease is a combination of infectious agents let loose from a laboratory, possibly from Plum Island by birds to the coast, causing multiple infections.” Nicolson contends Bb is often found in tandem with mycoplasma bacteria, which causes many of Lyme’s debilitating symptoms. Mycoplasmas found in foreign countries were studied on Plum Island since its inception; they may have been cross-contaminated with Bb and escaped the lab in the 1970s.
Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, who discovered the Lyme disease bacteria that bears his name, says, “The big question is where the ticks came from.” He believes that imported deer from Europe brought the deer tick species, and with it the bacteria, to America, where all three proliferated. I ask Dr. Burgdorfer about the Lyme disease connection to Plum Island. “Touching on something like that may cause a hell of a lot of problems,” he says. “You have to show a development in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems impossible—
“Unless,” he continues, “they cultivated the tick species on Plum Island, and unknowingly fed some ticks on animals or humans and a Borrelia spirochete [bacteria] accrued.” Dr. Wally Burgdorfer isn’t ready to prove the link, but he’s quick to point to the proven track record that helps make the case: “Plum Island is proof of the existence of breaks in biological safety.” And of a proposed biosafety-level-four upgrade at Plum Island, the most dangerous, he admits, “Even if it’s biosafety level four [the highest containment level], that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
☣ ☣ ☣
The tidy, conventional thinking on Lyme disease overlooks what
appears to be an inescapable truth: wild birds and deer contracted Bb
from ticks impregnated with a myriad of exotic germs studied on Plum
Island in helter-skelter, haphazard conditions. In theory, all it took was the
single infected Lone Star tick that escaped from the laboratory, crawled up
a blade of island grass, and dug its mouth parts into a small bird that passed
by. Thought to be a mere nuisance and now carriers of disease, bird migration and swimming-deer traffic cycled ticks carrying Bb throughout mainland Connecticut and Long Island. The birds and deer (themselves now
carrying Bb in their bloodstream) were bitten by more ticks on the mainland, including the ubiquitous deer tick, which in turn passed it along to
more mice, birds, and deer. From this breeding ground the Lyme disease
spiraled exponentially out of control, with over 150,000 documented cases
to date, and tens of thousands going unreported. Where Bb came from is as important as where it’s gone. It exists in two thirds of all ticks found in the eastern United States, and the disease has appeared in forty-five states and the District of Columbia. Thirteen thousand new cases are diagnosed each year. Untold numbers of infections go undetected, because the red bull’s-eye ring—the infamous signature of Lyme disease—appears in only 60 to 80 percent of all cases. Some infections appear as red, orange, or purple rashes; some are oval in shape, others triangular, and still others are horizontal. Sometimes Bb infection doesn’t even cause a rash.
At any rate, the apparent epicenter of Lyme disease seems dubiously close, too coincidentally close to Plum Island, a place that has raised far too many questions for the Bb link to be dismissed along with the three-headed chicken and five-legged cow.
☣ ☣ ☣
"You know, the worst, meanest, nastiest, ticks in the world are politics,” says Steve Nostrum. He knows that Lyme disease is a hot
potato few want to handle, especially when dealing with a secret island in
the middle of the most profitable summer tourism spot and coveted real
estate in America. Nostrum tried unsuccessfully for over a decade to get
coverage in local newspapers warning people to take precautions. A reporter once took him aside and told him, “You want to know, Steve, why
you can’t get anything published in the area papers? Well, off the record,
our major advertisers are telling us, ‘If you run one more story on Lyme
disease and ticks, we’re pulling our ads.’ ” After all, fear of Lyme disease is
bad business, and can devastate an economy that thrives off the fat wallets
of summer vacationers. Nostrum’s son came home from high school one
day with a letter telling parents they were going to teach students about the
AIDS virus. He called up the principal and said, “That’s wonderful that
you’re doing this—but the chances of my son getting AIDS are pretty slim.
Meanwhile, you have eighteen students in your school with IVs in their
arms at this moment suffering from Lyme disease.” He gave the school
“several thousands” of brochures on Lyme disease, and how to protect
against being bit by a tick. Not one pamphlet was handed out. “We live in
an area that is endemic of Lyme disease, and there’s not one brochure out
here,” says Nostrum. “What is wrong with this picture?” Thanks to advocates like Nostrum, the public has become aware of the debilitating ailment and how best to prevent it. He was the first to reject GlaxoSmithKline’s much-ballyhooed LYMErix, a genetically engineered Lyme disease vaccine that was pulled off the shelves in February 2002.10 Nostrum isn’t fully cured, either—you never can be. When he’s run down, fatigue and deep joint pain set in. He’ll never sing and play instruments again like he did back in the 1980s, when his quartet won a third place award from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. When he feels up to it, he spends evenings surf casting with his son, or stargazing from the telescope on his back porch. Most of all he likes to drive his car—New York State license plate MR LYME (his wife’s, MRS LYME)—over to the beach and quietly walk the rocky shore, collecting sand glass and seashells.
10 Though manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline generated $40 million in sales during its inaugural year, they cited poor sales when pulling it off the market. Some critics said it caused Lyme disease–like side effects such as arthritis and muscle pain, and created a false sense of security—it only reached 80 percent effectiveness after three doses were administered. It was also unsafe for children under fifteen years of age.
And he wonders.
2
1999: East End Meets West Nile
When man domesticated certain lower animals for his personal
comfort and gain, he assumed the obvious hazard of sharing
their diseases.
—DR. WILLIAM S. MIDDLETON (1956)
Birds were losing their minds at the Bronx Zoo. Some flew in perpetual circles. Others died in their cages. Veterinarian in charge
Dr. Tracey McNamara was concerned about the twenty-four birds—
ducks, owls, a bald eagle, a black-crowned heron, and magpies—
suffering in perhaps the most famous zoo in the world in August 1999. McNamara had recently attended Plum Island’s foreign animal disease school, where vets were taught how to diagnose exotic disease outbreaks and respond. But when she dialed the emergency telephone number set up to report possible foreign animal diseases, she found the line disconnected. The program was presided over by new Plum Island acting director Dr. Lee Ann Thomas, who had recently replaced director Dr. Alfonso Torres, who had replaced director Dr. Harley Moon when he left to return to Iowa in 1996, who replaced director Dr. Roger Breeze. Since Dr. Breeze’s departure, there had been no continuity in the laboratory’s leadership. According to sources, no one wanted the job because Breeze pulled the lab’s strings from afar.
In the last few days of that August, Dr. Deborah Asnis, a specialist in infectious disease at a small Queens hospital, noticed an unusual pattern. Two and then four hospital patients, all elderly, contracted fevers with headaches, muscle weakness, and mental ailments that progressed into comas. A fifth patient came in a few days later with the same symptoms, and neighboring hospitals admitted three more strikingly similar cases. Each victim had recently spent time outdoors in the evenings, and lived near Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, a marshy mosquito breeding ground on the Long Island Sound. Testing blood samples and fluid from spinal taps, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) diagnosed the ailment as St. Louis encephalitis (SLE), a malady caused by a domestic arbovirus (a virus transmitted by airborne insects) found along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The pesky mosquito was suspected as the culprit. New York City immediately launched a massive $6 million aerial and ground pesticide campaign, spraying the pesticide malathion (a potent neurotoxin carcinogen) and distributing over 300,000 cans of DEET chemical insect repellant to city firehouses, which spawned a public fright of its own.
The determined forty-five-year-old McNamara kept calling other numbers until she reached someone, and sent her bird tissue samples to the USDA’s domestic animal disease laboratory in Ames, Iowa. A trained pathologist, McNamara knew that SLE would attack the zoo’s chickens; finding the chickens healthy, she suspected a different germ was sickening both her patients and Dr. Asnis human ones. She called the CDC and told them about her freezer full of dead birds and about a possible animal–human link. A CDC scientist brushed her off, offering to send samples. “You’re just dealing with some veterinary thing,” he uttered with contempt. McNamara later told Madeline Drexler, author of Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections, that she felt the CDC treated her like a “dingbat, premenopausal female veterinarian in New York City.” McNamara sent the CDC the virus samples anyway—infected tissues of a snowy owl, several rare Chilean flamingos, and a cormorant—but the agency paid them no mind.
McNamara then contacted the Army’s germ labs at Fort Detrick. They requested samples be sent right away. Because of her persistence, Fort Detrick was able to determine that the germ from bird and human samples was the same virus—the “West Nile virus,” a microbe never before seen in the Western Hemisphere.
The culprit spreading the virus was the same one that transmitted the Rift Valley fever virus and so many other deadly germs—the wily mosquito.
The public reacted with hysteria. Parents kept their children indoors. Television reporters blitzed viewers with neighborhood chemical spraying alerts and tips on avoiding the virus, which seemed to be affecting the elderly, young children, and those with weakened immune systems, such as patients undergoing cancer treatments. Officials in Greenwich, Connecticut, announced a 5:00 p.m. curfew on all outdoor activities. A story in The New Yorker by Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, the best-seller about the feared Ebola virus, helped stir the pot. He revealed that an Iraqi defector (Saddam Hussein’s body double) told sources that West Nile virus strains were part of Iraq’s biological warfare program. Worse, the virus strain isolated by Fort Detrick was found to be similar to strains held by the Russians. “It is really an epidemic,” said a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, a few weeks after the initial diagnosis. “And this outbreak is still growing.” By year’s end, sixty-two people had been confirmed infected and five more died, raising the death toll to seven.
First discovered amid the swampy banks of the Nile River in Uganda in 1937, West Nile virus has increased its dominion far and wide in America, reaching forty-three states (as far west as Montana) via birds and mosquitoes. The casualties had shrunk to twenty-one infections and two deaths in 2000, but that was deceptive. Spreading with newfound fury in 2002, West Nile boasted 4,156 confirmed cases and 284 deaths in the United States. There were 329 cases in Louisiana alone, where the mosquito is half jokingly referred to as the state bird. Illinois topped all states with 884 confirmed infections and 64 deaths. An all-out chemical pesticide attack was waged from airplanes, pickup trucks, and handheld sprayers hopscotching from backyard to backyard.
News reporters interviewed doctors, who sought to play down the threat. During one recent NBC Nightly News segment, a doctor stressed that “only those over sixty are at risk.” Another state health official said, “The chances of being infected are very, very minimal. . . . It’s certainly nothing to be alarmed about.” But there appears to be an increasing number of infections in children, and West Nile virus strains are now attacking younger adults—such as a fifty-three-year-old otherwise healthy man. However, even if the scourge preyed only upon senior citizens, that still amounts to some thirty-two million men and women, one out of every eight Americans. And they aren’t just numbers—they are people’s parents, children’s grandparents, and America’s “Greatest Generation.” They are people like seventy-two-year-old Ernest Hunt from Louisiana, who succumbed three weeks after being bit by a mosquito while he and his wife, Becky, were enjoying a lakefront Fourth of July barbecue with family and friends. It is now a risk for people to tend to their gardens and take evening walks during the summer months, because the West Nile virus is lurking— everywhere.
By Labor Day 2003, over 5,000 human infections had been reported, and 95 deaths. The CDC predicted another 100 people would die by the end of the year. It is now estimated that since the initial August 1999 outbreak, 200,000 people have been exposed to the West Nile virus. The death toll is approaching 400 and rising. There is no known cure or human vaccine.
☠☣☠
West Nile virus struck New York City in August 1999 because of an
increase in international trade and travel, the scientists say. The same
scientists who chalk up Lyme disease to changes in human land-use patterns say that West Nile virus came to the United States in the passenger
cabin of a commercial airliner. One doctor lays out a scenario whereby
mosquitoes board an 1998 El Al flight from Israel (where scientists say a
similar strain existed in 1998) and bite passengers on board. After landing at
John F. Kennedy International Airport in southern Queens, New York,
some of the bitten passengers go home to the Flushing area in northern
Queens, where they are bitten again by domestic mosquitoes, which then
carry off the virus and lay eggs. Mosquitoes hitch a ride from the airport to
Flushing, goes the theory. The marshy inlets of the Long Island Sound provide an optimal breeding area, and female mosquitoes pass along the virus
to millions of their offspring for the 1999 mosquito season. This scenario is
certainly plausible, but it is far from proven—and there is no scientific support to back it up. “Unless there’s a molecular signature,” notes one scientist, “you can’t tell how it came in—you just can’t.” Though a few researchers rule out the possibility that the West Nile virus outbreak was a bioterrorism attack waged by an unknown enemy, most likely Iraq, others aren’t so sure. “Of course it could have been easily intentionally introduced,” says one scientist familiar with bioterrorism. “Saddam Hussein had worked on it and threatened us with it. All someone had to do was come into JFK Airport with a inconspicuously small bottle of twenty or so infected mosquitoes, and go to the Bronx Zoo or to Flushing Bay and let them loose.” The scientist rejects the conventional airplane theory because he says not one of the infected persons in 1999 was an airline passenger arriving from a foreign country.
Other than hypotheticals like these, the scientific community is at a loss to identify the origin of the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak.
For all their postulating, none of the seasoned virus hunters looked to New York–area germ laboratories. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Health said frankly, “It has not been on the top of our to-do list.” The director of the CDC, James Hughes, said as interesting as the question of how was to entertain, “the answer may remain elusive— Mother Nature does not always reveal her secrets.”
But was it Mother Nature’s secret to keep?
The West Nile outbreak brings to light the kinship between animal and human virus diseases. It illustrates how zoonotic viruses like West Nile fever, Rift Valley fever, Ebola fever, anthrax, and influenza move easily between animals and humans to achieve devastating results. For example, horses, like humans, are particularly susceptible to West Nile fever virus. What the public doesn’t know is that at the same exact time that humans in Queens were dying, dead horses were being quietly carted off Long Island farms to Plum Island. Where the El Al commercial jet scenario falls short is where the plight of the horses begins.
While Dr. McNamara tended to her Bronx Zoo bird flock and Dr. Asnis cared for her Queens patients, horse farm owners seventy-five miles east were placing frantic phone calls to Dr. John Andresen at the Mattituck-Laurel Veterinary Hospital. Owners of thirteen North Fork farms on the east end of Long Island phoned and each call sounded the same: their cherished horses were losing all sense of motor coordination. The horses’ hindlegs were buckling, and they were stumbling, neighing, twitching, and convulsing. “It was a mystery,” recalled Andresen, who normally received four horse-related phone calls in a year—not thirteen in a week. Going out to investigate, he found “neurological cases, which are uncommon in an equine practice.” One horse had collapsed in the stable, thrashing, unable to right himself on his legs. “It was in bad shape,” Dr. Andresen recalled. The poor stallion expired before Andresen could give its owner his prognosis. Alarmed by the rife similarities, he contacted New York State’s head veterinarian, Dr. John Huntley, who in turn called in the USDA’s emergency response team. It wasn’t the first time this virus SWAT team had descended upon Long Island’s North Fork; an earlier team spearheaded an investigation into a 1978 virus outbreak on Plum Island.
By August 26—just three days after Dr. Asnis phoned in her alert to the New York City Health Department—a strange disease was confirmed in eighteen cases on thirteen horse farms, all in the North Fork hamlets of Riverhead, Jamesport, and Mattituck. Ten horses died, either on their own or by lethal injection to ease their misery. Expert epidemiologists flew in from Kentucky, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and met with Dr. Andersen to get the lay of the land. The team collected samples from 146 horses in the area and found that an alarming 25 percent of them tested positive for West Nile virus. Each farm visited had large pools of standing water in watering areas, ripe for mosquito transmission.
All of the infections occurred in a five-mile radius. The epicenter of these mysterious horse deaths was less than twenty miles away from a faulty exotic virus disease laboratory.
Of all the counties polled in the New York City metropolitan area in 1999, Suffolk County’s dead bird and infected mosquito counts were among the highest recorded. The story of the horses raises even greater suspicions. Infection records from the last few years indicate how West Nile virus spread. In 2000, there were 60 cases and 20 deaths in seven states. In 2001, 738 confirmed cases and 156 deaths occurred in 20 states. In the outbreak year, 1999, records charted all equines in New York, Connecticut, and Maryland (the range of the West Nile virus outbreak by the end of its first year) into account—horses, ponies, mules, burros, and donkeys. Strikingly, none of the 271,000 equines tested positive for the West Nile virus, with one exception—Long Island’s North Fork.1 The simultaneous equine outbreak of this zoonotic virus, with the human outbreak occurring over seventy-five miles away, reveals that the ground zero of the West Nile virus outbreak was the North Fork peninsula opposite Plum Island, not JFK International Airport in New York City.
1 Two horses that tested positive for West Nile virus were stabled at Belmont Park racetrack in Nassau County, Long Island, west of the North Fork, which lies in Suffolk County. These horses were purportedly shipped from Suffolk.
If Plum Island was uninterested in West Nile virus in the past, it seems to have acquired a taste for the germ. In October 1999, on the heels of the outbreak, Lab 101 held four healthy Equus caballus, the common domestic horse. They were given intravenous injections of a West Nile virus strain obtained from Dr. McNamara’s Bronx Zoo collection of frozen infected birds. Each day, as the horses progressively sickened, animal handlers examined them. The scientists noted that the virus was not detectable in the blood until thirty days post infection, but occurred within forty-five days; all four succumbed. Autopsies were performed, and four new “horse adapted” virus strains were extracted for the Plum Island virus library. If West Nile virus is not detectable in horses for thirty days, that means the North Fork horses became infected with the virus bug in July of 1999, and perhaps earlier.
This all begs the question: did Plum Island have West Nile fever virus at the time of the outbreak? Dr. Robert Shope’s Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) across Long Island Sound held twenty-seven different strains of West Nile virus in its New Haven, Connecticut, freezers until 1995, when he moved to the University of Texas and took his strains with him. YARU and Plum Island often trafficked in viruses, most notably the dangerous Rift Valley fever virus in 1977. Had Dr. Shope shared West Nile virus reference samples with his friend Plum Island director Dr. Roger Breeze—the island laboratory being the only official location where foreign animal germs like West Nile virus are supposed to be studied? When I ask him, former Plum Island director Jerry Callis says he didn’t think it was in the virus repository in August 1999. “I never thought it was important enough. It’s more of a mild virus, not among the serious animal virus diseases,” he says, even though it appears fatal to birds. But Callis had left Plum Island in 1987 when Dr. Breeze came in. USDA official Wilda Martinez confirmed Dr. Callis’s beliefs when she assured the public that West Nile wasn’t studied there prior to the outbreak—but she declined to say whether the virus was in their freezers.
Former Plum Island scientist Jim House, a Cornell classmate of Dr. Andresen, thinks West Nile samples existed prior to 1999. “There were samples there, and it wasn’t answered clearly to the public. They didn’t honestly tell how many samples they had and that’s when people started to get upset.” It is certainly difficult to believe that the facility boasting the world’s largest collection of animal viruses would not have the West Nile fever virus, especially given the fact that right across Long Island Sound, YARU had no less than twenty-seven strains of the germ. Too, the North Fork horse epidemic is a footprint; and the cluster of horse stables, a most inviting first rest stop for mosquitoes and birds carrying the virus and working their way west from Plum Island, down the narrow strip of the North Fork. The USDA dispatched an emergency team to Long Island to examine how many horses were infected and on which horse farms. Yet they never turned their magnifying glasses on themselves. Had the fox been guarding the henhouse?
Martinez told the New York Post in 1999 that “top security [at Plum Island] does not mean top-secret.” But my requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act for a catalog of germs contained in the Plum Island virus library went denied on national security grounds.
3
1967: The Demise of the Ducks
You see, we do have an impact.
—PLUM ISLAND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
West Nile virus and Lyme disease aren’t the only suspicious germ
outbreaks where Plum Island is concerned. There’s also the
demise of the Long Island duck industry. In 1873, New York merchants Ed McGrath and James Palmer imported white Pekin ducks from China for American food consumption. The winding creeks, kettle-hole ponds, and sandy soils of eastern Long Island were prime for duck farms. By the turn of the century, no less than thirty separate commercial flocks were raised on Long Island. At the industry’s height, eight million savory Pekins were consumed in the United States annually—and Long Island produced six and a half million of them. Pekin were reared on over seventy Long Island farms, “picked” at their necks with knives, plucked, packed six to a box, and stored in walk-in freezers to await shipment. Roasted, marinated “Long Island duck” recipes became a national fancy. The name endures to this day, but the Pekin ducks do not.
The thriving Long Island duck industry was dealt a sudden fatal blow in the winter of 1967. Scores of white breeders from three months to two years old died on three adjacent farms; other ducks were trembling, becoming listless, and unable to stand upright. Instead of gaily flapping and quacking, flocks quietly sat on the ground, wings outstretched and heads down, clinical signs of physical weakness and depression. Whatever the ailment, it was highly contagious. It soon killed off well over half the flocks. The USDA swept in and took charge, ordering some six thousand ducks immediately poisoned and over fifty thousand eggs destroyed, costing local duck farmers millions of dollars. The infection was found to be the virus that caused Dutch duck plague (also called duck virus enteritis), an avian disease endemic to Holland, Belgium, India, and China. It was the first outbreak of this foreign animal disease within the United States. Two independent animal doctors who discovered the outbreak postulated how it occurred:
The detection of the disease on the American Continent invites some explanation as to origin. Had the disease been present for some time and remained undetected? Was the disease imported . . . ? Was it introduced indirectly by traffic in infected material...? The possibility seems remote that the disease had been present on Long Island for any length of time. In the long history of the intensive duck industry on Long Island, the disease had been neither suspected nor reported.
One farm employed Dutch farmworkers and entertained Dutch tourists, but they were dubious of that connection. “It is difficult or impossible to evaluate the importance of such traffic.” They were at a loss to explain such an explosive virus infection. No evidence could be found that Plum Island scientists investigated the nearby site of the outbreak, or whether they investigated a possible link between the island laboratory and the outbreak. But the USDA pamphlet “DUCK VIRUS ENTERITIS: An old world disease . . . in the new world” maintained, “In spite of careful investigations, the source of the original U.S. outbreak has not been determined.”
Three years later, the USDA announced a complete eradication of the virus. The department showered the Long Island duck farmers with awards for the important role they played in the campaign. The Plum Island virus laboratory, coincidentally nearby, had developed a vaccine for the duck farms to protect against further incursion of this exotic virus. But the plaudits and awards rang terribly hollow. The farmers had essentially participated in two eradications—that of the duck virus and of their own livelihood. With the farmers’ flocks crippled by Dutch duck plague virus, Suffolk County—under strong pressure from Hamptons-area real estate interests—crushed the remaining farms. The majestic white ducks and their baby ducklings were now unwanted pests quacking and defecating in the ponds and creeks of the new Hamptons social set. Invoking “protection of the environment,” the government closed duck farms, family farms that for a century were the backbone of Long Island’s east end economy. “Prompt enforcement of control measures confined the outbreak to New York State,” crowed the pithy USDA pamphlet.
The USDA was wrong about its ballyhooed disease campaign results. A prescient article, buried deep within the New York Times on Christmas Eve 1967, hinted at what the future held: FATAL VIRUS FOUND IN WILD DUCKS ON LI. The tiny newsbrief reported that sixty wild black ducks were found dead in Flanders Bay, at the head of Long Island’s North and South forks. A Department of the Interior official admitted the discovery posed a “more dangerous” problem than the duck-farm outbreak. He was right. Wild waterfowl, whose travel is impossible to control, picked up the virus from the Long Island duck farms and spread it north and south along the North American flyway to geese, swans, blue-winged teals, and mallards. In 1970 and 1971, the virus infected birds throughout Pennsylvania and Maryland. By 1973, it reached the Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge in faraway South Dakota, where forty thousand mallards and Canadian geese died and had to be collected, piled into a mammoth heap, and set ablaze. The infection reached the Gulf of Mexico and Canada by 1975.
The virus continues to spread to this day.
After the infection at the three farms, two local veterinarians brought bird carcasses and tissue specimens to Plum Island to confirm the infection by Dutch duck plague. Just as they had during the West Nile virus outbreak years later, Plum Island officials told reporters there was no possible way their laboratory caused this outbreak, because they did not study the virus until after the outbreak occurred. However, it was they who first conducted “exhaustive” laboratory tests and confirmed the outbreak was a foreign duck virus, so it’s safe to say they had diagnostic agents to detect the virus and conceivably the virus itself in their stores. After all, they had to match the virus against something to make a positive identification. The results, said the Plum Island scientists of the new virus unleashed in their backyard, were “particularly interesting . . . in that they point out that duck plague virus infection is, in most probability, a new infection on Long Island. It appears that the virus was introduced from outside areas to the Suffolk County duck farms.” Could there have been a laboratory leak on the order of the government-acknowledged virus outbreak that occurred there a decade later? As early as 1970, Plum Island was again working on a strain of duck virus, and this one had infected a man suffering from infectious hepatitis virus. “The implications,” wrote the scientists of their research, “offer some unpleasant possibilities: first as a mode of introducing a serious avian disease into this country, and second as a possible source of new human viruses by recombination between [the duck virus] and human influenza.”
Today, vast tract-home developments and million-dollar Hamptons estates rise above the fields where sixty-four family-owned duck farms once proudly stood. Meanwhile, a few small duck farms on Long Island are left, eking out a meager existence. There are two reminders of the once grand Long Island duck industry: a twenty-foot-tall concrete duck, built by a farmer in 1931 to sell his ducks and eggs on the roadside, that now sits guarding the entrance to a county park, and the Long Island Ducks, a minor league baseball team established in 2000, its untactful name highlighting an extinct part of New York State’s heritage. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that nine out of ten Long Island Duck fans couldn’t explain the origin of their team’s name.
Like West Nile fever and Lyme disease, Dutch duck plague is an emerging disease in the United States that continues to spread with no end in sight. And like the other two, no one knows to this day how the duck virus entered into the United States and ravaged the duck farms of eastern Long Island.
Speaking of the vaccine they prepared for the collapsed Long Island duck industry in 1975—too late to be of any help to the farmers—Plum Island assistant director Dr. John Graves said to a reporter, “You see, we do have an impact.”
☣ ☠ ☣
Three infectious germs, Bb, West Nile virus, and duck enteritis virus—
all foreign germs—have infiltrated the American landscape. All three
emerged from the same geographic locus. All three occurred in the vicinity
of a high-hazard, high-containment foreign germ laboratory with demonstrably faulty facilities and pitiable biological safety practices—flaws that
caused proven germ outbreaks in the past, and infections among its
employees. The public is asked to accept that none of these three outbreaks
is connected to Plum Island.
That’s what one calls blind faith. As you read on, consider for yourself whether that assertion has merit.
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