Did US military turn ticks into secret bioweapons?
- New Jersey lawmaker suggests the US government turned insects into bioweapons to spread disease and possibly released them
- Some believe the Lyme disease epidemic was a military experiment gone wrong
The US House of Representatives has called for an investigation into whether the spread of Lyme disease had its roots in a Pentagon experiment in weaponising ticks.
The House approved an amendment proposed by a Republican congressman from New Jersey, Chris Smith, instructing the defence department’s inspector general to conduct a review of whether the US “experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975”.
The review would have to assess the scope of the experiment and “whether any ticks or insects used in such experiment were released outside any laboratory by accident or experiment design”.
The amendment was approved by a voice vote in the House and added to a defence spending bill, but the bill still has to be reconciled with a Senate version.
Smith said the amendment was inspired by “a number of books and articles suggesting that significant research had been done at US government facilities including Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, to turn ticks and other insects into bioweapons”.