Episode #98: Bitten with Kris Newby

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Hello everyone and welcome to episode number 98 of the Better Health Guy Blogcast series. Today's guest is Chris Newby and the topic of the show is bitten. Chris Newby is an award winning science writer at Stanford University and the senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary Under Our Skin, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was a 2010 Oscar semifinalist. She has two degrees in engineering, a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah and a master's degree from Stanford University. Previously she was a technology writer for Apple and other Silicon Valley companies. She lives in Palo Alto, California. And now my interview with Chris Newby. I've had the honor of getting to know Chris Newby over the past several years through our local Lyme disease community, as well as from her work on Under Our Skin. Today we're going to talk about her new book, the Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological weapons, which is a real page turner. Thanks for being here today, Chris. It is an honor to have you.

Thanks for the invitation.

So tell us a little bit about your own personal Lyme disease journey, your journey to hell and back, as you term it in the book. How has Lyme disease impacted your own health?

Yeah. So in 2002, a friend said, come to my house on Martha's Vineyard. She says, hey, tics are a real problem this year. So she sent me a brochure before I flew out. And we, my husband and I, our whole family was going there and we read the brochure, told us how to do tick checks. We were there. We did tick checks every day. And a week after we got back from Martha's Vineyard, both my husband and I were sicker than we'd ever been before with all the like the most intense flu 10x you've ever had. And that started the journey to hell and back again. So it involved it took 10 doctors, $60,000 in medical expenses in a year to get diagnosed with Lyme. Later on we'd be, we'd find out we had babesiosis too, which is always a complicating factor. And I would say it was there's this myth that we live with all the time, that we have the greatest medical system in the world. But it was so eye opening to wake up every day for that year and be worse than the day before. And then all of a sudden, about eight months, well, maybe five or six months into it, saying, I could die from this. I mean, I'm a healthy person. How could this be happening? And then there's the whole thing where the process of doctors dismissing us and if there wasn't an easy answer for what was wrong with us. Well, the first clinic, the first infectious diseases at our community clinic said, well, I think you have a psychosomatic couples things. So it was like he was saying, I'm a housewife needing attention, so I'm feigning illness and my husband has sympathy pains. And then, and then we went to the large academic center and they ran a whole lot of tests and they were the first people to test us for Lyme, even though I'd been asked every, every one of the nine doctors before to test. And I tested positive for the elisa, which is not that great of a ticket, tick tests or Lyme tests. And then my husband tested negative. So they said, you have a false positive and we can't help you, so you need to go.

So you've talked a little bit about how difficult it was in your own personal journey to find doctors that could actually diagnose and treat you. Do you see that shifting since your experience back in 2002, 2003, to the point where people can find easier access to diagnosis and treatment today?

Not much. I just got back from introducing my book Back in Ground Zero. So that's New York and Long island, and I see that a few doctors are loosening up. And just when you come in with a tick bite, they give you doxy, which I think is sort of the right thing to do considering the seriousness of mixed infections. But so there's still this tendency for the mainstream doctors to attack and threaten the Lyme treating doctors. And the population of sick people has just gone up like, I think fourfold the last few years. So there's a huge shortage of doctors. So I don't know. When I gave my talk on Long island, which is, you know, in the shadow of Plum island or whatever, people were crying in the audience and they had these looks of horror on their faces. So I just think things haven't gotten better, really. Something needs to change. Something needs to change.

Well, hopefully some of that change comes from your new book as well. Tell us a little bit about the time when you were senior producer on the documentary that really had a significant impact on the Lyme movement, the Lyme community under our skin. How did you get involved in that project and what did it feel like for you to be personally contributing to the community in such a significant way through the film?

Well, I, I went to a grand rounds at Stanford with this famous Lyme pediatrician and he, he just shocked me. Like how he wrote off everyone with Lyme disease as being, you know, the mothers having Munchausens by proxy, the kids having psychological. I just found it shocking. And whereas I before I thought that I just happened to get a bunch of bad doctors and that's why it took 8 months, 10 months to test me for Lyme disease, even though our symptoms were classic. But then I realized that it was a much bigger problem than just my circumstances. And I like to say I realized the well of information about these tick borne diseases had been poisoned. And so then I started thinking about, I'm from a family of engineers and I started thinking, well we can fix this. This is easy. We just need to get the information out there. So a film came to mind and I transcribed that talk. And a filmmaker in Marin, Andy Wilson, had had a friend with a similar circumstances getting treatment and he was starting a film. So we teamed up because it was the perfect partnership. He's a. He's a great filmmaker and I had the scientific chops and writing skills to sort of supplement his efforts. So it was great.

Your new book really connects the dots between Lyme disease and biological weapons. Another book, Lab 257 has been talked about in the Lyme community for many years. How much overlap is there between the players and the events involved in Bitten and that of Lab 257?

I would say, well, Michael Carroll was the first. So kudos to him for doing due diligence and, and starting to have people open their minds to the possibility. He focused on Plum island, which was sort of the anti animal weapons that were developed by the Chemical and Biological Warfare Service. And I focused more on just Willie's work, which was more anti human and it was headquartered in Rocky Mountain labs. He was part of the entomological warfare program. But I would say Michael Karamolsk talked about Traub, who was a vet who was brought over here from Nazi Germany to tell us what the Germans were doing on biological warfare. And Willie said he never met Traub, but he worked with many of the German scientists, biological weapons scientists at Dietrich. And he said they were nice people.

Okay, so for those that may not be familiar, the main subject in your book is Willi Burgdorfer. And most of us knew Willie as the discoverer of Borrelia in Lyme disease and the namesake of Borrelia Burgdorferi. Many in the community consider him a hero, as I did when I met him in 2008 at an ILADS conference. But in your book, which learn, there is much more to the story. So tell us about your early discussions with Willie as part of the making of Under Our Skin. What did he share with you, and what was his comment at the very end of your discussion?

So, I think 2007, Andy and I went out to Hamilton, Montana, to interview Willie. And as we were setting up the lights, someone from the bioweapons lab came in and wanted to sit on the meeting. And Willie was retired, so he wasn't an employee. So we thought it was our right not to have an intrusive person that might suppress what Willie was saying. So he went away. I think Willie was a little upset about that because it was, you know, this lab person was implying that he wasn't loyal and that he might talk about things. So we had a good interview. And during that interview, Willie admitted something that was sort of shocking to anyone in the Lyme community, because the establishment says Lyme is easy to treat, easy to cure, two to four weeks of antibiotics, and you're good to go. What Willie says is the NIH knows that this Lyme disease can go on to be chronically disabling and hard to cure, and it's especially damaging for children with developing neurological systems. So that was more candid than we had ever heard from an ex government official. And we had a good interview. He wouldn't go much farther than that. We shut off all the cameras and started packing up. And then Willie had a little smile, and he says, I didn't tell you everything. So we knew there were things to be had. But, you know, we'd been working on the film for three years. We needed to get this thing out. And so, you know, after that, I said to my husband, I'm done with Lyme. This is my contribution to the community. And it was much appreciated because it really, for the first time, showed the patients they weren't alone. It was a bigger problem than just their bad doctor at home. It was a systemic problem in the medical community. But so about two weeks after I said to my husband, I'm done, I had a really good job science writing at Stanford, which is just so interesting. Every week. But then I get this call from an indie filmmaker, said, Willie just confessed to Lyme being a bioweapons. And he sent me this dvd. And I. It was a Saturday, middle of the day. I turned off all the lights in my house and closed the curtains and washed it for three hours. And, you know, he was compromised with advanced Parkinson's, so there was no sound bites that were slam dunk. But when you listen to the whole three hours, you just think, well, this guy is feeling really guilty about something, and he's somehow worked in the biological weapons program. We didn't know how. And so I thought, well, it just feels like my personal responsibility to the species to follow this through and find out what's the truth, because so many people are suffering if it's true.

So how were you able to access so much of the information that you put together in the book? You mentioned that it took years to get documents from your FOIA request. You spent countless hours reviewing materials from the archives. You had very surprising access to Willie's documents. How did you manage to get access to all of these things? And then what drove you to get back into doing this work?

Well, I just think it's. I'm just a curious person, and I just want to know what happened, because the whole documentary process, it was obvious that the government is withholding some information about the disease. People, these are smart people at the CDC and the nih, and it's just irrational that they would say that two to four weeks of doxycycline cure it when it's obvious it's not. So, you know, the first step was I had applied to look at Willy Bergdorfer's papers, which had been collected from the NIH and put in the National Archives, but that took six years. So the film was out before I got access to them. Right after the confession videotape, I flew out to the archive and looked through the 33 boxes there. And the first thing the filmmaker and I noticed is that there was, like, pretty much it looked like every piece of paper Willie ever touched in his whole life, but there was nothing about his Lyme disease discovery. So that was just odd. Like, what. What's the purpose of archiving it if his most important discovery wasn't in there? And in the place of where the Lyme disease files should have been, as far as on the timeline, there was this thing called the Swiss agent, and I just had no idea what it was, so that. That was a mystery. And so we copied a bunch of the files, and I went Back and just drilled down for a couple months. But then I said, well, the only thing to do is go back to see Willie. And I interviewed him. And that's when he gave me some details about his involvement in the biological weapons program. I didn't know he was in it for like 20 years, but he said he was asked to try and increase the fertility of ticks so you could grow more of them faster. And he said he put plague and fleas and he did something with mosquitoes. So that was shocking enough. So. So then I was still at a stalemate because Willie was really sick then, and I knew that would be my last interview with him and I wouldn't get anything else. And then there was just, you know, a gift from God. This guy named Ron Lindorf, he's an adjunct professor at byu. One day he got a call from Willie out of the blue and said, I have some files in my garage on my research and I would like you to put them in the BYU archive so everyone can see them. So it turns out Willie had possibly not given the NIH all those files. So Ron had heard through the lime grapevine that I was working on his biography and said, would you like an early look at them? Because the archival process can take, as we know, six years. So I went there to Utah, and that's where really the book couldn't have been done without those papers because it outlined all his biological weapons experiments that weren't in the nih and then just details about his personal life. So really, an important question to me is why? Why did. How did Willie get into the biological weapons program? Why did he do it? And then why did he finally decide to tell the truth?

So now that you've spent years researching, what do you think Willie didn't tell you? And what was the connection between that and his discovery of borrelia as the causative agent in Lyme disease? So how did Willie discover the spirochete that so many other scientists had missed for so long?

Well, he'd been studying spirochetes since the 40s, since he was getting his Ph.D. because that was a specialty of his mentor at the Swiss Tropical Institute. So he probably knew more about relapsing fever than that borrelia than anybody. Well, that's the question. There's sort of a two year gap where I don't know what happened in the shifting in what the scientists were thinking about the outbreak around Long Island Sound, Connecticut, Martha's Vineyard, that happened in the late 60s. So I call it like Nixon's missing 18 minutes. But what happened is around 78, 79, all the scientists involved in the discovery of what was causing the Lyme Connecticut outbreak, through the letters it looks like, oh, we've discovered what's making people sick. It's this little rickettsia. And a rickettsia is sort of a bacteria officially, but they thought it was a virus for a while. So it's very much like a virus. It hacks inside a cell wall and it starts stealing its energy and multiplying and then it bursts that cell and it becomes a chain reaction of cell destruction and you sort of bleed out and your blood vessel linings. So it's a nasty disease and it certainly could cause some of the lyme disease symptoms. So it was funny, like Alan Steer said, oh yeah, this is. He's one of the co discoverers. Oh yeah, I'm so excited that we've discovered that a rickettsel is causing it. But then all of a sudden that went dark and they never mentioned that rickettsel, which I called nicknamed Swiss agent USA because it had never been named or classified or published after about 1979 in any letters or scientific papers. And then like a year later, all of a sudden they said, oh, never mind about that rickettsel. It's this spirochete. And Willie has this well rehearsed story that seems to never deviate about how one night late, he was cutting open ticks, he cut open the midgut and there was a spirochete and a worm. And all of a sudden, yay, we discovered the cause. It's the spirochete. And no one ever heard from about the mysterious rickettsel again.

So early on in his work, the focus really was on vaccines, on protecting humans from what you termed tiny eight legged beasts. And later those beasts were turned into lethal weapons. So what were the goals of the bioweapons program? In the book you say Willie and others turn ticks into weapons of war. How do ticks come into the bioweapons work? Was this a government program and was it more offensive or defensive?

This was offenses offensive and I would say it was sort of a stealth secret weapon and the Russians were doing the same. So we had a bug born arms race. I'll just read this one section that I. This is from an army report from 1959. I think it sort of sums up the purpose of bug borne weapons pretty well. It says in 1953 the Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick established a program to study the use of arthropods that's eight legged beasts for spreading anti personnel bioweapons agents. The advantage of arthropods as bioweapons carriers are these. They inject the agent directly into the body so that a mask is no protection to a soldier. And they will remain alive for some time, keeping an area constantly dangerous. So if you look at the biological weapons program, which was almost as large as the Manhattan Project and as secretive, but their goal was to develop a portfolio of weapons. So on one end it would be very lethal. So they would put ticks and put very lethal things inside. For example, fleas, like bubonic plague, the disease that killed two thirds of Europe in the 1400s. And then over time they realized, well, we put, if we kill a bunch of people with bugs, they're gonna figure it out and there'll be body bags and that's bad for pr. And then they'll be able to figure out we did it. So that, I mean that happened in, well, it's happened in the Far East a couple times. So after a while they said, well, if we make, if we mix like rickettsals and viruses and bacterias inside an insect, then it'll create, you know, people get bitten, there'll be germs in there that the humans haven't developed over, you know, decades, natural human immunity. So that they'll get sick, they'll have a confusing set of symptoms that won't match anything in the medical textbooks. The illness will go on and on. And instead of just tying up one mortician, we'll tie up 10 healthcare workers. You know, it's just. And that way an army can go in, invade a city. Unlike bombs, the infrastructure would be in place and the people would still be alive to teach them how to run the electrical plants, the power plants, the factories. So that was the thinking.

What's the connection between Fort Detrick, Plum island and the geographic location that ties in with the beginning of the Lyme epidemic in Lyme, Connecticut. Do you think that the release of these infected ticks into society was an extension of the plan or an accidental occurrence? Is the Lyme disease that we experience in America today one big accident or the result of a release of these microbially infected ticks.

So to back up how Plum island is related to the insect borne program in Dietrich, and also there's another arm of it which is the anti crop program, like Agent Orange, which started at University of Wisconsin at Madison. So they're all part of the giant hydra headed biological warfare program that sort of started Expanding like crazy right after World War II, it was huge. 57 universities were enlisted sort of without knowing the purpose. The Smithsonian Institute was enlisted to track birds after they do drops. And they wanted to see things spread by the birds. It was huge. And so Plum island was part of the anti animal bioweapons program. So for example, in my book I reveal that we dropped ticks on Cuba because we wanted to harm their biggest cash crop, which is sugar. We wanted the people to revolt against Fidel Castro. And that was sort of run out of a tiny CIA special Operations divisions technical services division within Dietrich. And so Willie helped with the CIA programs against Cuba and he helped with just the straightforward biological weapons program. And so he was pretty much the go to guy for if you needed a special tick or wanted to know something about tick borne diseases. So what caused the Lyme disease epidemic? I don't have all the answers. I just sort of put it together like 100,000 piece puzzle where the dog had eaten a lot of the pieces of puzzle. But I ended the book being pretty clear about what I know and what I don't know. But I have some hypotheses that sort of guided my research and I guess, you know, you could put probabilities on things. I would give it an 80% probability that it was a compounding of human errors in the biological weapons program. Whereas mostly the army was pretty safe and careful. There were different standards for open air testing of dangerous live organisms. So they did like vulnerability studies. Spraying live microbes from boats, from trucks, running through the Pennsylvania tunnels, dropping light bulbs with live bacteria in the New York subway system. So I mean my, my guess on what happened around the line, Connecticut is, you know, we released these dangerous man biting, aggressive Lone Star ticks on the Atlantic Bird flyway in Virginia. And I think, you know, all of a sudden we had this really aggressive group of ticks moving north, north to Long Island. Some of them were radioactive, so who knows if that induced mutations and maybe that's what's creating this sort of meat allergy thing. Then also there was just many of these airborne tests of diseases, some of them which can be carried by ticks. So we would spray simulants from planes, from trains, from boats. And who knows if a bunch of, I mean nature has a way of getting, of escaping. You can't contain nature, even if the most careful person call it human hubris. And some of these organisms were crudely genetically altered. So if there was a tick release, if some of the ticks they were testing was they thought they were laboratory clean, but they were infected with some of the bad things that were in the lab. If it was one of these aerosolized tests and that mixed with aggressive ticks. So that's my 80% scenario. The other scenario is that when Willy told me and a bunch of other people that the Russians stole some virulent agents from the lab, he said that to several people. And how clever would that be if the Russians stole microbes from us and then released it back on us because they knew we could never talk about it? So that would be like a 5% scenario.

In the book, you have some eerie photos showing how Willie infected ticks with a soup of pathogens. You also suggest and show evidence that supports the use of ticks as a delivery system for this cocktail of organisms that could potentially incapacitate as part of the bioweapons program. Do you think that ticks today would be perceived as nature's dirty needle, as some people refer to them, if the organisms had not been unnaturally placed into them?

Well, I think ticks naturally carry. I mean, recent studies show that ticks carrying natural path, many pathogens is the norm rather than the exception. And we're just now developing microbial tools, genetic tools, where we can tell everything that's in the tick. And Ian Lipkins group at Columbia now is trying to do a survey around Long island about what's in them. And we're finding, like, there's way more viruses than we realize, because just now we're being able to sequence them and see that they're different species. So, but here's the deal. It's all about balance in nature. And if you have established colonies of ticks and the microbes within them, in order to be a successful parasite, you have to not kill the host. You know, you want your genome to be passed on and on and on and on for the generations. So I think things were pretty stable. But what the bioweapons program did is just chaos theory. Like certain number of microbes that had never been seen by humans or animals or mammals were released. And then it's wreaking havoc and there's an instability and some of the weaker of all these mammalian species, including us, die off because there's not that balance. So, you know, upset the balance. And now add to that the compounding factors of climate change. And Mary Beth Pfeiffer has a great book on Lyme disease, the first epidemic of climate change. And definitely that's a contributor. Ticks are not dying off in the winter. There's Overrun of deer. That's a contributor. There's more people living in tick habitats, so. So, you know, it's man's impact on the earth and we just need to be more careful. And now we need to deal with this problem and not let it fester anymore because it's been 50 years. Let's fix it.

You talked about rickettsias. Talk to us a little about some of the organisms that were part of this mix that Willie was experimenting with. What were some of the other organisms they were working with.

Early on, in the early 50s, it seems like they were putting in ticks. And the only thing they published is they were doing it in soft body ticks. But the photo I have in the book is of hard body ticks. They're putting them in there, but. So they were. The way the bioweapons program worked is they wanted an insect that wouldn't call attention to itself, and then they would put an unnatural germ in it. And so they had a list of what they thought were the most lethal or important disease causing pathogens. So Willie would put like Venezuelan equine encephalitis in the ticks and tularemia, which is also rabid fever, and leptospirosis, which is another spirochete, closely related Borrelia and rabies, those kind of things. And so the purpose of these experiments were to see what microbes would live in the ticks, because it's actually a harder thing to do if you're trying to deploy these living systems in bombs. You have to keep the ticks alive, you have to keep the microbes alive. And it just takes a lot of work to find matches that are compatible.

How much of a role do you think the borrelia itself plays in Lyme diseases compared to being part of this bigger soup? And do you think that the Borrelia of today is the same Borrelia from the times of Otzi the Iceman, let's say. Or do you think that they also did some enhancement of Borrelia itself as part of this program?

I know Willy was always sending different Borrelias to Fort Detrick, and I'm not sure what they were doing on the other side, because Willie really wasn't into the genetic manipulation that was done in other places. But it seems to me, talking to people from all over the world, that the strain around Lyme, Connecticut Aborrelia, is just much more virulent than, say, Europe. So, I mean, my gut says it may have been genetically juiced. If you look at it. Borrelia is one of the most complicated, genetically complicated bacterium that we know of. For example, syphilis, which is a simpler is a spirochete just like Borrelia. But we know how damaging syphilis is. It gets into your brain. It causes madness and craziness and violence. And Borrelia looks just like it on the outside. But if you look at syphilis, it has 22 genes. If you look at Borrelia, it has 132 genes. Plus it has these rings of genes called plasmids which allow it to swap genetic material with other spirochetes, sex in the traditional mode and mutate very quickly. So it seems like it could be juiced. But I'm not a geneticist and you know, one thing I wanted the book to do is to tweak the curiosity of scientists to say, wow, if you look at this whole big picture of the outbreak and how complicated the borrelia is and the fact that around Long island the, the first case of babesiosis, a cattle parasite went into man and started causing disease. And then there's this Lyme arthritis and it's all within like a very small area and it's like, hey scientists, wouldn't this be interesting thing to base your thesis on? So that's what I hope it does, is I'm reframing the Lyme problem. It's just not just Lyme. You have to look at the co infections.

Absolutely. Talk to us a little more about the smoking gun or Rickettsia helvetica I believe is the more current name for it. In book you talked about 124 ticks that Willie had dissected, showing 98% of them had rickettsia, only 60% of them had a spirochete. What role do you think Willie thought rickettsias might have played in Lyme disease? And what role do you think they currently play in the modern Lyme disease epidemic?

Through the garage files that Ron Lindorf found, I found the early drafts of his science magazine, the science article, and in that article, in an early draft, I don't know how far it was a very first draft or a second one or whatever he says. I based on the response of all the organisms I found in the Lyme patients, the Lyme ticks, I think the culprit could be this Borrelia spirochete or this new rickettsyl I found, or both of them. And more, more work needs to be done. But then that rickettsel fell off the radar. So why did it fall off the radar in every other, you know, instance that I could see. Looking through his historical papers, you know, 38 years of research, he always included variables that he didn't understand yet and say, we need more research. So why did it disappear? It's suspicious. It smells like a cover up. I don't have a proof of that for sure, but. So anyways, this Rickettsel. So this Rickettsel, which I call Swiss Agent usa tests positive to the antigens which are the surface markers of the Swiss agent in Europe, which is now called Rickettsia helvetica. And at the time, Willie and his scientists over in Switzerland said it's non pathogenic to man. And now we're finding that, yeah, it does, it does cause disease, it's heart issues and other diseases that you can look up online. So are they related? I mean, it is suspicious that the Swiss Agent USA didn't test positive to any of the known pathogenic rickettsis, but yet it does. This one that he just discovered and claimed credit for. So I guess originally I thought that was the main thing, but I talked to some tick specialists and one Yuli Munderloh in Minnesota, she goes, well, that could have been a symbiont, which means one of those harmless Ricketts that just hang out in ticks and maybe helps the ticks digest red blood cells. So I don't know that, you know, I've gone as far as I can as a journalist with my technical training and. But I presented enough facts that, you know, I hope the people, people can start sequencing Borelli and say, okay, you know, hey, Borelli Burgdorfrey, who's your daddy? You know, where did you come from? What flask of some biological weapons lab? Or is it just a random mutation? I don't know. I think Willie definitely felt guilty about many things. I mean, the things he worked on. So this, this is part of it.

So interestingly, around the Swiss agent conversation, recently Armand Labs introduced an Elispot test for Rickettsia which includes Rickettsia helvetica. What are your thoughts on that and how might the results of those tests result in new light being shed on this potential problem?

Well, about a year ago, I went to a Rickettsel conference and spoke to the, the owner of Fuller Labs and he knew about Rickettsia helvetica. And he said, you know, Rickettslas, Rickettsias are really small and they hide in cells and if you're not and they need special stains just to See them under a microscope. He says, so if you're not looking for a specific rickettsly, you won't find it, you know. So I'm hoping that with a wider availability of these tests we can find out what is really in these ticks and only then can we know how to treat people with these complicated mixed infections. I mean, if you look at what my husband and I had, we had borrelia and babesia and I possibly had rickettsias early on before it was treated with doxy. So you know, there's this. As anyone in the Lyme community knows, there's not one antibiotic that kills all of those organisms. They're slightly different. And there's a certain order you need to apply those antibiotics to, first of all, not overwhelm person's cleansing system with dead bugs. You know, overwhelming the liver and the kidney and getting rid of the toxic little bodies of these bugs. So you have to start out slowly and then you have to maybe eliminate the Lyme first and the babesia. But anyways, they're still working on those protocols. So we need to know what's in the ticks so we know how to treat the humans.

What is the Anthrax Hotel and the eight ball, which also happens to be where the Lyme documentary under the eight ball got its name. What do you think happened to many of the people that were experimented on in the eight ball? And do we know if any of them developed something similar to chronic Lyme disease?

So the eight ball was a million liter sphere that was made of steel built by the submarine makers of Groton, Connecticut. It's an amazing looking metal. Riveted thing or welded thing. It's not riveted and it looks like something straight out of Dr. No. Very steampunk. But that was used to test aerosolized biological weapons on animals and humans. It had these portholes around the diameter. And volunteers were mostly Seventh day Adventists. Conscientious objectors who didn't want to go to Vietnam agreed to be human guinea pigs to test the vaccines and the aerosolized germs. And there was doctors that would track the diseases and make sure they're okay. So for that aerosolized program, no one died. There was a great deal of pride with the seventh day Adventists who volunteered for that. And they had still, you know, they had support groups and you know, they thought it was a worthwhile thing to do. I've heard rumors of a few people having chronic illnesses, but it hasn't been a big thing Unlike the biological warfare program that was done from ships, which is called shad, a lot of those sailors on the ships were exposed to things like Agent Oranges and the Agent Orange and the bacteria that were sprayed the stimulants that supposedly didn't cause problems. But, you know, they. Especially for the people delivering them those intense doses and they've had chronic things and those people are more bitter. And there's a. Someone sued the CIA a class action suit, and there's reparations going on there. But back to the Anthrax Hotel. So both the Sphere and the Anthrax Hotel were on Fort Detrick, which was the headquarters of our biological weapons program. And the Anthrax Hotel was where they had large vats brewing anthrax. Like you would brew beer, microbrewery, and then they would mill the back. They would freeze dry the bacteria and they would mill it and they would do experiments because, you know, there's just the right particle size to be picked up by the wind and not kill the bacteria. And you get to feed the bacteria something. There has to be a growth medium, so you coat it with yeast and sugar. It's like baking. And so anthrax is just. It's hard to get rid of once you spray it around someplace. And that's how in the beginning of the book, I say it's like American Chairman Noble. It's a little bit like radioactivity. It's just always in the. It's there. So in this building. This building was contaminated forever, the Anthrax Hotel. And at the end of the bioweapons program, they boarded it up, but they realized it's a liability and so they demolitioned it. And there is a rumor that one of the guys in the demolition died of anthrax inhalation. I haven't confirmed that personally, but it's anecdote around Dietrich because it's just hard to get rid of.

For some time, my opinion has been that viruses play a bigger role in Lyme disease than most people consider. We know the common Epstein Barr, HHV6, herpes zoster, and a host of others. But now we have this additional conversation around potentially acquiring viruses through insect vectors, as well as potentially resulting from some of Willie's work. So how large of a factor do you think viruses are in terms of Willie's work and what people experience today when they have something like chronic Lyme disease?

I agree viruses are really important. And only now do we have tools to know really, you know, what's in the ticks. As far as viruses go, Willie did not work with viruses much. But you have to realize he was, he ran the tick zoo of the biological weapons program. He's always sending ticks to people. And though he fought the ticks for were clean, you know, he would say many times there's no such thing as a clean tick. So could there have been viruses in them and then could they have been introduced into the biological weapons program where they thought that it was only a bacteria in there could be. And then also you have the fact that when you get a tick borne disease, your immune system is compromised and some are opportunistic and they flare up. So it's all about looking at the total body and having an intelligent approach in knocking off both viruses and the bacteria. And as you know, with your work, which is all about looking at the whole human and making sure you're living clean, exercising, eating the right things, supplementing where the germs are depleting your body and all that.

So let's talk a little about that immune compromise that you just mentioned in the book. There's the idea that viruses may have been used so that testing for the Lyme organisms were more likely to be false negatives. Do you think that the viruses that come from the ticks potentially suppress the immune system which then results in us having more difficulty in finding an immune response to Borrelia? For example.

Willie told me directly that he was working with Colorado tick fever virus and he seemed to be sort of guilty about. Feel guilty about that work. Colorado tick fever virus, which is mostly in the Rocky Mountains, is also nicknamed American hemorrhagic fever. And anyways, he said they would combine it with other bacteria. And I don't know if that's genetically or just in a tick. He wasn't clear about that, but he says the virus would lower the antibody production. So those are the cells of your immune system that fight off infections and it would allow the bacteria to take hold, create a chronic disabling disease. That's my part I'm adding. But so definitely they were combining these things to make a confusing set of symptoms. And he said it makes it hard to test for. And then you have all these doctors who I would call it, it's like a failure of imagination. All these doctors go to medical school and they aren't thinking about the bioweapons angle and how that can distort symptom lists and testing strategies. So in a way it's like this book. I hope it'll make them think about these crazy Patients that show up with mixed infections. It's like, well, maybe this isn't a natural disease.

In Willy's research around the goat herds becoming ill, he found rickettsia, an unidentified protozoa similar to Babesia, which turned out to be Trypanosoma, and a parasitic deer worm. So let's talk a little about the parasites. Nematodes or parasitic worms have also been seen in ticks. Was there experimentation with parasites being conducted as well? And what role might parasites play in Lyme disease as a result of nematodes that are being found in ticks?

So from Willie's research papers, he was working on endoparasitic infections. So studying like putting parasites or microbes inside worms. And on this report, there's no information on the purpose of this, but I know from another bioweapons expert who's in the the book that the Russians at least were working on these bacterial weapons that I would call them, like Russian nesting doll strategies. So you get a bacteria and you put a toxin in it, like botulism. And so then you would spray that on a population and they would take antibiotics and it would dissolve the bacteria but release the toxin in it. So it's just so evil, it's unimaginable. So, you know, maybe Willie was doing defensive work when they got leaked documents from the Russians, or maybe it was part of our offensive program. But it is suspicious that when He, Willie, went in 78 to study what was killing the goat herds, which they thought was a rickettsy, maybe, or they thought it was Q fever actually, which is another bioweapon. And he noted in those tics that, like you said, there was a worm, a wrecketzel, and that's the same thing that was in Long Island. So it raised the question, question, why is it the same, you know, triad of strange organisms in both places? And this rickettsal is new and it doesn't test positive to our known rickettsels. So it's as Willie would say. Question, question.

We know that fleas were also part of the experimentation. We know that fleas, ticks can be sources of exposure to Bartonella. We know that Bartonella and Babesia both are significant co infections in Lyme disease. Do you think that there was any work being done in this bioweapons program around Bartonella or Babesia, or do you think that those just are coincidental and unrelated?

In Willie's files, which is where I mostly look, he did research that the Babesia like protozome, he had a lot of slides on those so he was looking into those. I got a list from Riley Housewright from the 70s on everything that they weaponized all the pathogens. And I would say Bartonella and Babesia weren't on that list of maybe 40 things under consideration, but there were things in the labs that were being tweaked. So I didn't see anything specifically about Babesia that Willie worked on, but then that may have been worked on in Plum, at Plum island, because that was mostly an animal pathogen. Okay. Bartonella there was. I saw some documents in Canada that they were experimenting with that, but I didn't see that in the American program. They did work on Brucella a lot.

Why do you think Willie shared some of his admissions and his archives with you near the end of his life? Do you think that he had a goal in doing so? Do you think that he potentially wanted you to write this book, to share the details more openly with people? Why did he ask Ron Lindorf to come to Montana to get all his research, his files, and put it on the Internet so people can see it?

Well, the decision to be a whistleblower is a complicated one because you feel loyalty to the people you've worked for. He came from the generation post Post World War II, Pearl harbor, where patriotism was really important. But he was Swiss, and he was neutral. And you can tell from reading his personal letters that working. I mean, he loved his new country. He loved Montana. But when he realized very shortly the purpose to his experiments, I think it ate away his conscience. I mean, early on, he had to stay in Montana. He had a wife who needed a lot of medical attention. He had two sons, and he couldn't move. He needed this job. And once you're in the biological weapons program for a while, it's not like you can. You're published, and you can easily jump to a university, and all your best work is classified. So as he got older, I think. And I think whatever happened during the discovery where he had to violate his strongly held belief that in science, you tell the truth, you don't cover up organisms just because it's politically inconvenient. He kept on talking about, oh, it's just politics, all politics. And I think he was definitely guilty of the times I interviewed him. And at some point, he decided to release these documents that he had not given to the NIH archivist.

In the book, you talk about a Swiss bank account that Willie had opened and how shortly thereafter he seemed to have no problems with money. How does that fit into the discussion? And where do you Think he was getting the money.

Question.

Now you're answering my questions like Willie answered your question.

Now, what he wanted to do. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the money thing. So let me just say Willie was one of the most frugal people I've ever heard about. Right up there with Ebenezer. I mean, he was a penny pincher. He came out of the war. He came from a working class family. They were really poor. So he watched his pennies and he was not frivolous at all. And so in this investigation, because he's a government employee, I can know what he earned his whole life. And you look at the total and it would be very hard to earn as much money as he died with on just the straight salary. You could say, oh, well, maybe he was a wise investor. But, you know, he was a scientist and he put stuff in savings bonds and CDs. It wasn't that sophisticated. And he had this secret bank account that his heirs didn't know about when he died. So. But that said, you know, I don't have subpoena power. I can't request his IRS forms, you know, and it's sort of out of my venue. But I know just by. I didn't. I thought long and hard about it even including it. But, you know, if he was paid off by a foreign power, I think it's important for the people who will watch, who read the book, to carry it a step further. Because if he's part of a network, we would want it exposed and just understand the vulnerabilities.

In the book. You talk about Willie being asked if the pathogen he found in the tick was the same one that he had published about in 1952, and he seemed to confirm that it was. With everything that, you know today, do you think that Lyme disease is a naturally occurring condition or the result of a more sinister exploration as part of this bioweapons program?

I mean, my hypothesis is it's sort of a Three Mile island situation, that it was a series of human mistakes associated with the biological weapons program. But I can't prove that because I don't have a sequencer in my office. Sequencer in my office. So I'm leaving that to the scientists.

And are we all collateral damage in a biological weapons race that started during the Cold War?

Yeah, I think so. I think it just the toxins we release through the military program, heavy metals, the chemicals like Agent Orange, these biological weapons, you know, the gases, the greenhouse gases that are creating climate change. It's just like it's a wake up call that it's part of the whole human hubris thing. And we have to realize we're part of nature. We're not the overlords of all living things. We need to, like, bring harmony back to our living conditions. So, yeah, answer is yes.

So knowing everything that you know now, do you perceive Willie as a good guy or a bad guy? Did his, quote, discovery help the lyme community, or did his silence around the complexities involved in lyme lead to irreparable harm and crimes against humanity?

You know, I just see people full of gray. There's no good guy, bad guy. And when people do things, of course they think they're a good guy. I really enjoyed sort of like trying to understand Willie, and I have more compassion for the situation he was in and why I'm. While I wouldn't have made those decisions, you know, he did. And I understand why he did because he had a family. He was sort of trapped in his situation, and I think he loved his native. But in the end, I believe in redemption, and he made it right. In the end, he exposed the things that he felt were important. I wish he had said more. It would have made my life easier. But hopefully we can, you know, learn what we can from the past and right the sinking ship.

After Willie died, a box was found at his home with a sticky note that read, I wondered why somebody didn't do something. Then I realized that I am somebody. What do you think he meant by that message?

Well, that was his whistleblower confession. And it was on the box that showed his dietrich, his dietrich files, and his biological weapons files, which I think, as a scientist, he felt guilty about. So, and I just wanted to add, too, that it's really important that we learn from this history right now because we're on the eve of we've got crispr gene editing, we're messing with the genes of the aedes mosquito, which carries zika and dengue doing open air tests. And we need to really know about the mistakes that we made in this biological weapons program and not be too cavalier about messing with nature. So that's Willie was thinking too.

In the book, you talk about an experiment gone wrong that may have exposed Willie himself to lyme and other organisms that led to an em rash. What role did Willie think, and do you think that lyme and other organisms that they were experimenting with may have played in the development of his own Parkinson's disease, which ultimately claimed his life in 2014?

Well, going through his Papers. He also had a pretty bad case of rickettsias when he first became the head of the rickettsial section at Rocky Mountain lab. And then the other thing, which isn't well publicized by the nih, and you have to wonder about that, is that right after the discovery, I think it was 83, 82 or 83, he was in a frenzy of experiments, trying to confirm the science that Lyme causes this. These diseases in animals. And, you know, when you're a microbiologist like that, you pretty much have to work seven days a week because on the weekends, the lab techs aren't there. So he would go in to clean the rabbit cages, and during that time, some of the infected rabbits. He says he's cleaning out the trays underneath the urine splashed in his eyes, and he believes that's when he got Lyme disease. He has a picture and, of course, extensive scientific sketches and notes of his EM rashes. He had about five under his armpit, and they look pretty much like classic bullseye rashes. Though there was a ton of controversy within the lab where they didn't. They thought it was a fungus, so. But Willie thought he had Lyme disease. And he implied, not just to me, but other people, that he thought the Parkinson's could have been caused by the Lyme disease. And, you know, but that he would be flippant about it. He says, ask the doctors.

Yeah, you know, you have a picture of that rash in the book, and there's so many. I don't know that they're good pictures, but there's so many pictures in the book that you look at, and they just. They stir up a lot of deep emotion. I think for the reader of the book, it's interesting, particularly the photos of the ticks being fed the pathogens and the way that they then use the mice to have the ticks feed on the mice and all of that. I mean, it's really. Interesting is probably the wrong word, but it is interesting to see the photos that you have in the book that really support a lot of what we're talking about here.

Yeah, it's. It's a story. Well, with pictures, it's just easier to believe. If I say horse feeding ticks, you wouldn't believe it. To see it, it's like, oh, yeah, there's no legitimate reason or, you know, natural reason to do that. There's something just. You can't deny. It's the bioweapons program. When you see something like that in.

The book, you say the main Issue is that we're viewing this public health crisis too narrowly through lime colored glasses. Do you feel that a better understanding as to which organisms may have been used as part of this program can lead us to different treatment strategies? Is there too much focus on borrelia in the lyme disease treatment model? And how much of a role do you think other organisms play in what we think of as chronic Lyme disease?

Definitely we've hyper focused on Lyme disease. I go back to the very original discovery and there was an interesting thing. There was a quite a bit of competition amongst the scientists on who would get the credit to solving this mysterious Lyme arthritis. A lot of egos involved. And so, you know, if you were to not even believe the biological weapons angle, you could say, well, they just wanted to oversimplify the program, the problem, and the solution for the general public to reduce the hysteria. Because it was like page one of the New York Times, Everybody was freaked out, you know, so they could say, oh, this is what we'll do. We'll just say it was Lyme disease. And there's no doubt Lyme disease causes disease, I have to say. But if there's these other diseases and maybe one of them had bioweapons origins, maybe we can quickly get, you know, maybe we can quickly treat people with doxycycline, which will get rid of the rickettsia, and then we'll fast track a vaccine for the Lyme disease, and then we can knock that off too. And then no one will be the wiser to the biological weapons complication that the messiness that came along. So I would say that is a likely scenario.

How do you think your book will be perceived by the Lyme community? I definitely found it amazingly detailed. A very interesting story when we consider the suffering that resulted from Willie's work could have been completely avoidable. That certainly brings up a number of emotions for those of us that have had our lives really changed by this experimentation. So what's the good that you hope comes from the book, and how do you see your book really changing the direction of the Lyme disease epidemic and hopefully how Lyme disease is treated?

I think the thing that was frustrating after the film is that 10 years after the film, the discussion on what Lyme disease is and how to cure these people and better tests and treatments are just frozen in time. The discussion is still polarized. One side won't talk to the other. A little bit like our political party system. So I just want to like, enlarge the frame of the problem and get like young fresh scientists who aren't entrenched in the politics to look at the problem anew, think of out of the box experiences, experiments. I think our use of antibiotics are like a sledgehammer and that they're going to be a lot more clever ways to defeat these pathogens using things like crispr, the genomic manipulation. So let's enlarge the discussion. Bring in more than infectious diseases people, geneticists, evolutionary biologists. And so that's what I hope it does. Now, as far as patients, you know, I just, this is a weird media landscape. I don't know how it was going to be received. I just, you know, I hunkered down for the last year and said I'm going to make this as factually accurate as possible. I'm going to say clearly what I know, what I don't know so I can have leads for other people to carry on, crowdsource the investigation. So I, you know, I was at the end of Long island at Rivershead over the weekend and I spoke to about 150 people that have been harmed by this epidemic more than anyone else. And I looked out in the audience and people were crying. People had stunned looks on their faces like they had just watched the Twin Towers fall. I mean, it's just, it's really disillusioning to know that the government's inaction or possibly active cover ups has caused this much suffering. So, you know, I hope we can be positive in the reaction to it and use this to get more funding. We just need more funding. We need more bright scientists working on these problems and we need to move forward and not look to the past too much, you know, just let's fix this problem.

So the book just came out within the past week. What kind of comments are you getting so far from people that have read it?

I would say, you know, the people who've suffered, the Lyme patients have read it and it's just like getting really good reviews from them. I mean I made it very accessible. I'm a science writer at Stanford, so my job is to like not get people too bogged down in the details. I wanted to make it sort of per page turner, as you said, so it would give people the scope of the problem. The major Lyme foundations have embraced it, I think because they realized it can be used to show to Congress to get more funding. I would say mainstream media hasn't really picked up on it because the premise is so unbelievable because I mean this program was so secretive and only the Cold War historians or the bug geeks have known this for a while. I was at a university talking to a person who was writing public policy on what should our BR policy on genetically engineering these Zika mosquitoes and releasing them. And I said, oh, you know about our history and entomological warfare, don't you? And she goes, no, what history? You know, so we need people to understand the mistakes so we don't do it again.

I mean it is an unbelievable story, right? I mean when you, when you read the book, it is. If someone had said the entire book was completely fiction, it would have been an interesting fiction story. Unfortunately, it's not fiction.

Yeah, yeah. I mean some of the experiments are crazy. Like one of my favorite Canadian experiments is the black fly and salmon experiment. So they lay salmon with E. Coli and then drop these bombs with black flies. And then the black flies would spread the E. Coli into a village and make them all sick. Who thinks these things up? Like how do you sleep at night?

So I think the book is pretty readily available. Amazon.com and other sources tell us how people can continue to follow you and follow your work.

So I'm trying to post media interviews like this and reviews and such on my personal website. Was chris newby.com and I also have an Instagram page that I'm going to post sort of the book tour process. I have some really great archival photos on KrisNewby.com which I think are just really interesting because my documentary work, I know how important visuals are. So I worked really hard to find those Beautiful, beautiful.

The last question is the same question that I ask of every guest. What are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

Exercise is the number one. Even at Stanford, the anti aging people say there's no drug as good as exercise. Then you know, I'm on an energy budget because I've had this horribly chronic disease. So I try to minimize stress as much as I can in my daily life. So that's made me a better planner. So I don't have as many crises when I feel something coming on. I love a really hot dry sauna. I think it detoxifies really well. And healthier eating, but mostly exercise. Even through my really, really sick years, I would try to exercise no matter how minor.

And how are you doing today in terms of your own health journey?

You know, I think I'm. I've been working a full time job. It's pretty intensive because I have deadlines. I can't do all nighters anymore. So, you know, I get plenty of sleep and if I have to work overtime, I get up super early in the morning. So I'm doing well. But you know, I feel like my immune system is a little fragile, so I just have to be careful.

You are amazing. The impact that you've had on Lyme disease community, the whole history of Lyme disease, through your work on Under Our Skin, and now bringing out a lot of this information that hopefully will be something that people will embrace and really do some additional research and make different decisions and really continue to be part of the shift in a positive direction. So I want to just thank you for spending time here today talking about the book and talking about all the things that you learned and thank you for everything that you've done for the Lyme community. I want to honor you for all of your efforts.

Well, I thank you too for the same reasons. I mean, you're my go to person for ideas on health and I think you're really sort of breaking some new ground. I appreciate the wisdom and the knowledge you're gaining in disseminating.

Thanks so much, Chris.

Thanks, Scott.

To learn more about Today's guest, visit ChrisNewby.com that's Chris K-R-I-S Newby N-E-W-B-Y.com Chris Newby.com thanks for your interest in today's show. If you'd like to follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you can find me there as Better HealthGuy. To support the show, please visit betterhealthguy.com donate if you'd like to be added to my newsletter, visit betterhealthguy.com newsletters and this and other shows can be found on YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Thanks for listening to this Better Health Guy blogcast with Scott, your Better Health Guy. To check out additional shows and learn more about Scott's personal journey to better health, please visit betterhealthguy.com.