U.S. military under investigation over claims it weaponized ticks to spread insidious disease

Scientists have long debated a chilling question: Did the US military weaponize ticks during the Cold War?

Now, Congress is demanding answers with a newly filed amendment that directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate whether federal agencies experimented with pathogen-laden ticks as tools of war.

The provision, authored by New Jersey Representative Chris Smith and filed on Friday, calls for a review of military, National Institutes of Health and US Department of Agriculture projects conducted between 1945 and 1972 involving Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales, two families of bacteria linked to tick-borne illnesses.

Smith, who co-chairs the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus, said the effort is driven by New Jersey's unusually high infection rates and concerns for civilians and military personnel stationed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

'The hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans suffering from Lyme disease deserve to know the truth about the origins of their illness,' Smith said.

Smith is not the first public official to raise such questions, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has previously suggested that Lyme disease may have emerged from a failed US bioweapons program in the 1970s, allegedly involving research at Plum Island, New York...

Much of the theory traces back to the 2019 book 'Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons' and related interviews with the late Swiss-born scientist Willy Burgdorfer, who identified the Lyme disease pathogen in 1981 and previously worked as a US military bioweapons specialist during the Cold War.

According to the book and related sources, Burgdorfer and other researchers allegedly injected ticks and other insects, including fleas and mosquitoes, with pathogens such as those causing Q fever, tularemia and relapsing fever to study their potential use as biological weapons.

The accounts also describe experiments in which ticks were force-fed infectious agents through glass capillary tubes and discussions about dispersing 'weaponized' ticks from aircraft to incapacitate enemy populations.

The book further alleges that hundreds of thousands of radioactive ticks were released in Montana and along the Atlantic Flyway to track how far they could spread.

The new amendment revives two similar efforts Smith introduced in 2019 and 2021 that passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

Smith said the latest GAO probe could either substantiate or finally put to rest theories about government involvement in the spread of Lyme disease.

'If the investigation finds that our bioweapons program had nothing to do with it, we turn the page,' Smith said. 'But the American people deserve answers.'