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 insectory be undertaken for future research."[9] 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.
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.[10] 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.
But Dr. Endris wasn't on Plum Island in 1975; his entomology expertise and the "modern, approved" tick insectory 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 politicks," 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?"
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"A good tick will last about one minute," says Endris. "Any living biological protein will coagulate at that temperature."