Ticks

Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scaret all the time. I'm Chris Colari and I'm for Cola. And this is our second episode in our multi month Summer of Fear that runs June through August. We kicked it off with a look at Tsunamis in our last episode with the Ladies of Drinking the kool Aid, and this week we are getting up close and personal with a creature that might be one of God's biggest mistakes outside of the Ocean. Outside of the ocean, these are ticks. These biting, bloodsucking bastards can spread disease and misery further and faster than almost any other creature on Earth, with the exception of mosquitoes, which we'll be looking at next summer under a microscope. They look like monsters, and if you're unlucky enough to get one burrowing under your skin this summer, you might just find out how dangerous they can really be. From lime disease to meet allergies to finding themselves at the center of one of the most popular conspiracies of the last I don't know fifty years. Ticks tick every box on the summer of fear or on the fear tier, okay, both both. They tick all the boxes, everywhere, all the time, and then some. So put on your long pants, don't forget your high socks, and join us for a sunny walk through the fields of fear. But please stay away from the long grass. We would really love it if you survive the summer. What are we screw? When are we all the time? Now? Which is time for time? So ed? Yeah, chew that gummy bear, brother. It's not it's mots fruit snack. If they want to sponsor. Us, we're open for business. If you want to throw an ad on an episode of about blood sucking iraknids. It should be gushers. It should be cushers. Yeah, ticks have our attention this summer. They do every year. There's always at least one news cycle with headlines that are like tick season is here and it's worse than ever, or lime disease infections are up, Hikers dropping dead of tickborn illnesses. Ticks will get on you man. I was visiting a farm, a tree farm, doing research on projects I'm working on this past I don't know. It wasn't the summer, it was later than the summer. But they told me they also have like a dog, like a farm dog that fuck every day they're covered in ticks. Yeah, when they get home, like every day of working in the farm. Yeah. And then they said they also have to go through the dog. Who's a delightful little dog. Yeah, well not little, but there's a delightful dog, and they would like have to go through the whole dog too. Yeah. Where is this tree farm? Connecticut? Ah? We talk a lot about Connecticut. And I bet not an eystlime or anything, but it is Connecticut. I don't know why I brought that up so fast, but I just thought about it. It was the first thing on your mind. I said, ticks, And you thought about the ticks eating this poor dog. Well, I just thought about There are jobs where you're like, I'm gonna run into ticks for sure every single fucking day. Yeah. Yeah, Well, we don't have those kinds of jobs. Podcasting is not one of those jobs. Even though I. When we lose our houses then it will be out in the field doing it for sure. Yeah, even though I've lived in LA for almost twenty years at this point, a place where ticks are not the worst kind of bloodsucker you run across, I still get grossed out at the thought of them. Growing up in the woods on the East Coast installed ticks, I think, is just a permanent fixture of my sonxiety programming. If they aren't part of yours, they probably should be. They are nasty little fuckers, crawling on our skin, getting under our clothes, feeding off of us, and transmitting all kinds of horrific blood board diseases. As one article I found put it, quote, more than grizzly bears or mountain lions, the ticks of spring threaten human incursions into the wild and mark our sense of the living world as a place that is not so friendly to us. After all. I also learned that ticks aren't just a summer problem I always thought they were. Ticks can be active on winter days when ground temperatures are as low as forty five degrees fahrenheit. What are they doing out there? Looking for food, looking to eat? Do they only eat blood? They only eat blood? All right? Well, that I knew about ticks. The fact that they were active during the winter is one of the many things I learned in this was going to be very long episode about ticks. Jesus Man, I had no idea how ancient they actually are. I mean, I just said, Jesus Man, if they're ancient enough, he might have been like kidney with these ticks, because they walked everywhere, those guys him and those apostles. Yeah, and in the in the this that's. Why they're watching each other's feet. Yeah, they're like fucking covering. Your coverings are everywhere. I had no idea how ancient they are. I had no idea what they're actually doing to your skin when they bite you. Sure. I definitely had no idea that they're making thousands of Americans allergic to hamburgers. I'm sorry what? And I sort of maybe the little inkling of an idea how they were related to the Nazi scientists on a secret government island off the coast of Connecticut. But before we get into all that, Ed, what is your history with tics? I started it early that I've went to a farm. Yeah, yeah, I heard. We covered the farm, the trees, the dog combed, the dog the ticks. But as a kid in Connecticut, every. That was a check for tics when you get home from this is you have to understand back when we went outside to play and stuff. Yeah, kids, these days, you know you're not going to get a tick. You're not getting unless you're playing marathon where ticks is the name of a thing that chases you. Andy, we keep calling them spiders, but apparently they're ticks. Yeah, it was like check for tics, check for tics, check for tics. That's like I heard that. Every day you get home two things, you know, wash your hands you've been in public, and check for ticks. Did you ever find one? Oh? Yeah? My mom would use like like burnt matchheads to like get them out and then like and you can't like crush them and stuff, so you got to like put them in tape. Tape is one way burnt matchheads. We get into this a little bit. She might have just been burner for no reason. She might have been I think she was. I think Miss Vee was burning you for fun. I will say every time I say anything, she hit She listens to every episode. Then she's like, what sends me a holy email? Like it wasn't really We're remembering. We're not we're not, We're not putting dirt on your name. But I did find that the match heads, the burning them off is really not a recommended way to get them off and apparently pretty uneffective. Ineffective. Now I only had one tick. Well, I found a lot of ticks growing up. I had one guy. As harry as you You never saw ticks. No, I kind of hidden there because you gotta feel around. I found them, but I only ever had one that really dug in. It was like a problem, Oh, like you try and get out with sweezers and his head stays in. Did you have one of those ever? I think it came up. I don't know if that happened, but I'm saying I think there was a lot of protocol about, like, right, make sure the head doesn't stay in. I remember that much. I remember this one because A as far as I remember, it's the only tick that ever really dug in on me. And B. I was in like fifth or sixth grade. I came back from a hike at my grandparents in Massachusetts, and when I got undressed to take a shower, I found it on my butt. Yeah, they go to butt's balls. They go to spots. I remember having my shorts like my butt exposed to my grandmother as. For a long year age. I was like, this was like fifth or sixth grade, like the age where you don't want to be showing your ass your grandmother at all. And there was much discussion and to do of how are we getting this thing out? Are we going to use tweezers or we've done grandma, Yeah, we're got to burn it off. And I don't remember how they eventually did get I think it was tweezers that she managed to like pinch the head and make sure it came fully out. But and I never got sick and every went to the hospital. It wasn't the most horrific experience. And to be honest, I think that being the worst tick ex I ever had kind of set me up to grow up thinking that ticks weren't really that big of a deal. Yeah, but there was a boogeyman element to them that they had to have been a big deal, Like there was so much to do about checking for ticks when you get home our whole lives, that it wouldn't be for just because we don't like the way they look. No, and we have one. We have one family friend, Yeah, who's got line disease. And for I don't know if it was from a tick, it must be probably, I don't know, but it is a truly debilitating disease. And so if I see a tick, I'm a punch in his face. Yeah, we're gonna spend the rest of this episode talking about all the reasons I grew up not being afraid enough of ticks, because not everyone is as lucky as I was. And to understand how a bug the size of a pencil tip. If you live somewhere where you've never seen a tick, these things are fucking tiny. That's part of why people have to check so carefully because they are easy to miss, especially if you have hairy legs like I do, or you know, even if you like freckles, a lot of freckles, they'll blend right the fucking Yeah. Brad Paisley, the country artist, has a song that's I might even be called Ticks. The kind of gross but funny premise of the song is he like kind of wants to like be with a lady, and it was like, hey, we can take Tar's clothes off and check each other for ticks is essentially the like premise is like, hey, that's something we all have to do around here, check for ticks. Yeah, how fun could it be with each other? Country music stays winning. It's Yeah, I'm Brad Paisley's the best. I love Brad Paisley. But it's a silly, silly song. But I hadn't thought about it in a minute. Yeah, it's gross, but it's. A pretty fun. It's a good, good concept for a song. But to understand we first we first have to understand what a tick is to understand why they're so dangerous. So I think people know the basics. They are tiny little parasites. They feed on the blood of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians and all reptiles. Yeah, reptiles, Oh. My god, just a lizard with a tick on it, and what is happening? They are not insects, they are araknids. So the spider family. They're the spider family, the scorpion family. All that really means is that they have four pairs of legs as adults and no antenna. But I think being sucked on by a spider parasite is just definitively worse. Than they suck on other rachnids. That's a good question, like cannibalistic. They I don't think they feed on each other. They might feed on a spider. I don't know spiders. How much blood does a spider have? I don't think I. Can imagine there's a lot of blood, don't don't. I can't imagine a scorpion being like, what's that? What are you doing, Bud? Like, what's that conversation? A scorpion? But get away from me? Yeah, yeah, I don't. I don't think they have any blood. Feed on any other insects. It's really just creatures with a lot of flowing blood. While all ticks are araknids, there are two main families of ticks. There are hard ticks. Those are the ones we can't we can't kill, put them in tape. Yes, yeah, yeah. The EXO, the EXO skeletons, the IXO to die family, EXO to die. I don't know. I'm trying to be better about mispronounciation. One so I've been looking up how to pronounce a lot of I'll tell you this. It's spelled I x O D I D A E x so did die? All right? Well, they're the cod tics. Hard ticks. They're the kind you see in your mind's eye when you If you've ever seen a tick, it's probably one of these. They look like a very very tiny, nearly flat crab basically, yeah, with a hard little plate on their back. Deer ticks that give you lime. The lone Star tick that we'll talk about later, the American dog. Ticks, lone Star tick in Texas. You'd think you'd think, Okay, all hard ticks. We're gonna talk a lot about hard ticks on this show. Should go well for the automatic transcription. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there are soft ticks. The family are We're going to get some interesting ad options. Yeah yeah, blue chees like guys. You can't help but notice you've been talking a lot about soft dicks. Yeah, hard dicks. Both of those are our business. And one of your host is literally named Ed. Yeah, call us up. The business opportunities here. Ed. It's a it's a rich area. It's a rich it's a rich area. So the soft ticks are Gossidaye family are crazy looking. I don't think I've ever seen a soft tick before. I would love if you not turn your computer around. I never want to see a soft tick. Some people describe them as flattened raisins, flaccid raisins, flattened raisins, raisins already a flattened grape. Well, it's the hydrated grape, it is. But these are even flatter than raisins. They mostly live in caves and bird nests and animal burrows, and feed in quick spurts rather than the multi day siege that a hard tick would prefer. Soft ticks are generally not a problem for humans, I guess, unless maybe someone replaces all your raisins with them, in which case, who. Shrunk my raisins? Yeah, we spend as much time in caves or bird nests. No, All hard ticks and most of the soft ones share the same basic life cycle from egg to larvae to nymph to adult. Now, this is one of the first big things that I learned. Each stage of that life cycle, the tick requires a single blood meal in order to molt and move to the next se I need to feed four times. Basically, they feed three or four times over the course of their whole lives. Yeah, so triple unlucky if you're getting eaten, What do you mean, like it's I guess there's probably a lot of ticks, but I was just gonna say that, like, you know, they only need to eat four times, like you're one of their four meals. Like that's unlucky for you that you happen to be caught in that weird moment when they need to eat. Like, well, yeah, you're right, there are there's I don't I didn't look up how much I'm asquilo. I didn't look up how many ticks exist on planet Earth. But it's not surprising that you might have more than one feed on you. But it is a it is a meaningful parasitic relationship in the sense that you are directly helping this thing. Oh, I guess you could look at it that way and turn you're dying. It's taking away everything that makes you. It's drinking grow literal juice of your life. Yeah. According to CDC, some tick species, like the brown dog tick, which may have been feeding on your four legged friend that you were talking about, prefer to feed on the same host during all life stages. So these dog ticks are lazy, disgusting little freaks. Yeah, or they're not lazy, you know what I mean. If if they prefer it and they commit to It're they're asking for a change of address and information and stuff. Like, well they're committing. There might be like a Homeward Bound style Pixar movie about it trying to. Like Kick who gets separated from his dog? Yeah, like it's slinky dog, Yeah from Toys Story. All the other ticks or lots of other ticks need to feed on a different animal for each of these blood meals that they have to do. So a baby tick hatches from an egg. It finds a small host like a mouse or a bird, latches on, drinks its multi day blood meal, drops off molts into a nymph. A nymph finds a slightly bigger host, latches on, takes a multi day blood meal, drops off molts into an adult and then adult ticks find the biggest hosts, and in the woods of the eastern United States, the biggest host is either a deer or you and the female. It's mostly the females that feed on blood. It seems like the males. I don't know why. I just in my mind there was no sexiest to these things. They were really when you see it, I can't imagine the trouble. It would be too sex a tick. Yeah, to figure out what we're looking at. It's hard enough. On dart frogs a tick, you definitely need a microscope. But the female takes one final massive blood meal before laying somewhere between two thousand and eighteen thousand eggs. All right, so it's not that rare, and there's a lot of ticks out there, there's a lot of Each one of these is dropping eighteen thousand fucking babies. Yeah, most of them don't survive because, yeah, because they need to find all these different creatures to feed on, and that's a difficult thing for them. The only saving grace here, I think is that, unlike vampires, all this blood drinking doesn't really do anything to extend the ticks life span very far. They die young. Most ticks don't live any longer than three years. So although I wonder if they did live longer than three years, if they just have to keep finding bigger and bigger animals until they become the size of a rabbit hanging off of an elephant or something. Disgusting. I hate what I'm hearing. How do you think they found out the three year like? It was like a documentary crew followed one tick from Larva. To There are people who study parasitic animals. We'll get into well, we're not going to touch on it too much, but there are scientists who study these things and who you know, really ticks get a lot of attention because they spread disease so far and so quickly that they've been studied intensely to figure out how do we stop this? You know, what can we do to make sure people don't catch these diseases? How long do they live? For people who are invested in making sure that humans don't get tickborn diseases, the lifespan being three years or five years, or ten years or twenty years, that makes a huge difference in how you're, you know, going about treating these things. So they've they've been studied quite a bit. But for those three years, ticks are on the war path and out for blood. They can't fly or jump, thank god, truly, although I remember, I don't remember who told me this or when, but there was a point when I was a kid that I was told that they fall on you from trees. They could. I don't know why. They doesn't require the ability to fly, just a fall. It is just a fall, but they don't do. I think I think that sort of urban myth about ticks got started because they are often found feeding on human scalps. But I think they just crawl up there. They do just crawl up there. That's the really gross thing about it, finding a tick on your scalp. They're cruising around. They start at the feet. Yeah, the knowledge of knowing, oh, this tick's been on me. For a while. What and they're smart enough to know, go scalp, go somewhere you're hiding. They can they have not traditional smart maybe yeah what. I they're not doing advanced physics. Yeah, they do have a lot of organs that can sense the things warmth, I think carbon dioxide. Like, they have the ability to sense where they should be rooting around to get their next meal. Okay. They hunt by performing a move called questing, which is a pretty impressive feed of strength. But also in the video game parlance of it all is how they live their life. Yes, unless you're the brown tick dog or whatever you're like, and now I need to find another creature. And it was like each one in the reward at the end of this quest is like molt. Yeah, it really is a leveling up system. Of you know, you gotta go grind, you gotta get your XP and you got to become the next thing. They perform this move called quest, which is a pretty impressive feet of strength for something their size. So they climb up under the tip of a blade of grass or a leaf or a low hanging branch or something. They hold on to that leaf with their back legs and then they stick their front legs straight out in the air in sort of this like spread eagle Jesus on the cross posey. And if you're watching the video, see this is why you guys, you got to sign up for the YouTube channel. You gotta see. I don't know a frame, but. I'll go this way, I'll go this way. But they stick out like this spread eagle Jesus on the cross posts, and the front legs have organs called Holler's organs or Howler's organs that can sense carbon dioxide, body heat, and vibration, so they're almost like their legs become almost little antennas, and they just dangle them out there in the air. They just stand there waiting for warm blooded life to pass, and then when it does, they grab on climb aboard. When do they come down from the grass. At what point are they like, I've been waving my arms for days. Yeah, I assume it's like a nine to five. Yeah. They then they'd clock in, They go down the grass, and then they get in a fight with their dick siblings to tick spouse, and then they get back up there the next day. Because there's a lot of places where nothing ever walks by. Probably probably yeah, And you know, to go to the other side of the yard might be a seven year journey for a little tick. Yeah. According to the CDC, some ticks will attach quickly and others will wander looking for places like the ear or other areas where the skin is thinner. Oh yeah, they'll get in there. They'll get right in that ear feeling. Believe that I've had ears as long as I have and have not you know, knock on Wood really had as far as I know stuff living in there. I've seen enough like episodes of of Er or like stuff where it's like, oh, I've got like an itching noise in my ear and then they pull it out. It's like ooz a full of cockroach. It died four days ago. Yeah, I'm just surprised that all our holes aren't filled at all times. That is what I'm saying, considering everything so small, they could be. So they say you swallow like eight spiders a year or something. Yeah, I don't remember how that landed in Our Spider's episode of that was true or not, but I don't either. We did look it up, but I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah, no, our holes could be filled with hard ticks. Soft ticks, yeah, I think. Hard probably a better chance. Once the tick finds a seat at the table, that is when the really nasty shit starts, because unlike a mosquito that basically just stabs you, drinks for a second and flies off, a tick is basically doing surgery on you and then moving. In per an article I found on PubMed Central, the tick has three main mouth parts. The two outer pieces called palps, helps sense where to dig in. The two middle blades are called shelissira, which the tick uses to literally slice open your skin like a little scalpel okay. And then in the center of those three pieces is the real like hr Geiger night mare piece, the hypostome, which is a barbed needle like spike covered in rows of backwards facing teeth, so. It's the little mouth that comes out in alien. Yes, basically, except this little mouth instead of shoving a stomach or a face hugger down your throat or I don't think it does that, just. A little mouth and alien. It's just like a weird small that comes out. Yeah, I always, I guess I always assume that the purpose of that was to shove the egg down your throat. No, because the egg is a completely separate thing that face huggers come out of. That's a good point. Yeah, the face hugger is the delivery method. Then you are the host. You burst out, and the last life cycle of the thing that grew in you is an alien that has a smaller alien on a rail in. Its mouth, which they made for great toys. Though they made for good toys. So yes, this the hypostome is sort of like the thing that comes out of the alien's mouth and alien, except it is barbed and covered in needles and covered in backwards facing teeth. I imagine's barbed so it doesn't like fly off you. Yeah, it drives it in and then you can't pull us fish hook. Now, those three mouthparts are just to make sure it's attached long enough to do the really hard work of actually cementing itself to your body. I had no idea they did. So the barbs is not cement. The barbs is not cement. It's not just the cut and the spike. Ticks are also part construction worker, and they use what it's called literally tick cement to make sure that they stay attached to you. So they secrete something. Yes, the University of Rhode Island runs a public health project called tick Encounter, and they have a write up on how this works. It is colorfully titled when I pulled this tick off, my skin came with it, and it is probably the most informational piece of body horror I've ever read. So quote, ticks could begin secreting cement within five to thirty minutes of attachment, and that concrete comes in what the article calls flavors. There's cone cement, which is deposited first and hardens rapidly, and then after about a day, the tick begins secreting cortical cement, which hardens more slowly. The pattern of cement deposits varies among types of ticks, and the degree to which the cement infiltrates the host epidermis and dermis or. Your skin also differs by species, and this species specific pattern of cement deposition also probably helps determine just how much of you comes off along with the tick, even when removed correctly. With tweezers, yeah, because you don't realize that you're all so it's not. It's probably just taking the smallest amount of top layer skin off and not that we wouldn't even notice. Potentially, this article made it sound like skin comes off, but you know that may depend on again the size of tick, how much cement it secretes. I mean, I can't imagine you're pulling it off and then just like a fruit by the foot ribbon of skins all the way down your arm. No, it doesn't. I don't think the tick attaches itself so much that you can peel your skin off. Banana, that's the way this articles making it sound. But banana might be one of those cement flavors. Yeah, it doesn't mention which flavor tastes better, but it does sound like it can be very painful sometimes to remove the full tick. Some ticks, like the lazy American dog ticks we mentioned earlier quote secrete additional deposits of cement in various dimensions onto the skin's surface, forming flat lateral flangies that aggregate on the skin and help secure the attachment of the ticks with shorter mouth parts to their hosts. But it also means that more skin is likely to be sacrificed when removing those kinds of ticks. I don't like fuck these ticks, man, Yeah, but I like downlike their whole The whole thing sucks. While it's glued. They do suck. Hey, Okay, while this thing is glued to you, it's pumping basically a chemical cocktail that you would like find in a hospital into your bloodstream. There's anesthetics so you don't feel the bite. Okay, just like leeches. Leeches do something similar. I feel like, Yes, there's anticoagulants I was thinking of keep the blood flowing. Yeah, and immunosuppressants so that your body doesn't notice that it's there. Yeah. So it's also not like, hey, a foreign infection. Yeah, we should send something from osmosis jones down there. Exactly. They just hang out and your body is none the wise. This is ridiculous. This is like if a cat burglar had the ability to cut the window. You know in their body and then also not be seen by any security cameras once it's in the jewelry place. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. That's crazy. That would be the most dangerous burglar in the world. They would never get caught. Well, the difference is the burglar needs to get in and out. That's the whole point. The tick wants to stay attached to you for as long as possible. Is that shanging say in the movie it was perfectly fine, roofman. This is a roofman tick. It inst for a while. It's true the criminal that moves in. Because unlike mosquitos, the point of doing all of this is, well, like mosquitos, they want to get to your blood, but unlike mosquitos, they're not tapping a vein and just drinking. They want to hang out. So these ticks use their shellisea ray, those little scalpels that they have on their mouth to cut your blood vessels open, and then they sit there with their face basically in a pool of blood that wells up from under your skin. Okay, biologists call them pool feeders because a tick doesn't really drink your blood so much as it bathes in it. No, depending on the species, ticks will suck this blood anywhere from minutes to days, which. Is well, I need to know about the minutes, what blood type there's gop no, thank you? You know what I mean? Like every other tick's there. For a while, I was like, what the hell was wrong with that guy? I got in a pool of this disgusting blood and I got out of there. Yeah. I would imagine the ticks that are picky enough that they're out of there after a few minutes probably don't live very long. I mean, or they're alone like us, well, like me. There might there might be. There's probably some more research about because a lot of the research I read definitely makes it sound like ticks are there for the long haul. So this particular biology saying minutes to days, I don't know. Maybe he means hundreds of thousands of minutes, or maybe there's just some rare species of tick. Or some species it gets on only lives minutes. Possibly possibly, I don't know what the point of that would be. They don't know, they knew, we know nothing about most of these I'm saying, like they don't know, like ticks don't know they don't know what they're getting on. That's that's true. They don't know the difference between. They might get on a fucking dog that's sick, a deer that was like just came into the woods to die alone. Yeah, and then it's like I got one and then it was like this blood turned real coal all of a sudden. Oh no, I think it's dead. I should leave. Can they take dead blood? That's a good question. I actually I don't know. I would assume that you could probably get a tick to feed on recently deceased or blood for no. I think the leeches came up in leeches. I think they were like not into it. Did we do leeches? Yeah, if you did it. Well, we talked about leeches and New Fair un Locked. Oh right, I was gonna say, because we were got. I was I had leeches on the Summer of Fear for this year, and I booted them for ticks. But leeches will come up again someday. Yeah, it'd be weird if I just knew all this stuff about leeches. Yeah, I don't know about it because you told me all of it. We did do leeches on New Fair Unlocked about people who only. Pets they have little leashes for them. Yeah. Go, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, make sure you check it out. It's crazy. It'll make you feel great about all the decisions you make because you're like, at least I'm not a person who owns a leash. Yeah, I'm sorry, a leech leash. Yeah. So, all this time that ticks spend bathing in your blood is part of why they are so prone to carrying blood born infections, because they have lots of time to soak up any disease that might be lingering in one animal system and then pass it on to the next person or creature. Okay, just a quick list of the diseases Jesus man the ticks carry. We're not going to talk about all of them in detail, but trust me, none of them are good. We've got alpha a gal syndrome, and a plasmosis, babe ceosis, bourbon virus, Colorado ticks. All of these sound awesome, by the way, we're talking bourbon babes alphas. Yeah, this should all be in the manisphere. Why are we talking about this? Andrew Tate is like I've I have given myself bourbon virus. Yeah, he probably wouldn't appreciate an alpha gal. But yeah, he wouldn't understand it, couldn't wrap his little head around it. But babe ciosis and bourbon virus back. To those would be those they would trick him in some sort of He would be entrapped by they be like, hey, you have what there? I feel like you could have gotten Alex Jones to sell one of those as a pill or something as as over as one of his supplements. Honestly, we'll sell him as a pill. If call us sounds like we haven't heard from who do we want? Earlier grapes and mots. So if we don't hear from Mots, we'll take babe virus. We wanted blue Chow, blue Choo and the babe virus go to get a hand in hand. Yeah, if we don't hear from blue Choo by the end of the day, we'll take alpha gel babe virus. Well, not take it, we'll take it to sell. Got you kah, Yeah, I don't want these items. In addition to the fun ones, we've got Colorado tick. Fever also fun sounding erlachiosis first one it sounds gross. Hard tick relapsing fever. Second one it sounds gross, heartland virus, that bad lime disease, the worst you can be, powacin virus, Ricketsia, parkeri, ricketosis, rocky mountain, spotted fever, soft tick, relapsing fever, a disease called starry that's just capital sta r. I yeah, that can't be helping. That soda tularima or sorry, tullerama, okay, and three sixty four D ricketziosis. Oh my god, that would give them space ticks. Yeah, I do so. Colorado must be up there with Connecticut in terms of tick fever because there's a lot of Colorado yes stuff in there. Any any place. I think the heartland Colorado all this rot, but they've got lots of grassy, open spaces where these ticks are hanging out. I think is part of it. Sure, and yet none of these are good, despite how fun some of them do sound. I'd love to see the babe ciosis with three sixty four D richziosis. That would bet it an anime girl. Before we dive into all of the really terrible illnesses, I should note that it is not just humans and modern animals that have had to contend with ticks. We have evidence that tics have been around since the age of the dinosaurs. In twenty seventeen, a team of paleontologists led by Enrique Penelverer published a paper describing five fossil ticks that they'd found preserved in ninety nine million year old Burmese amber. And one of these ticks. Amber doesn't get enough credit, It really doesn't. One of these ticks had been frozen mid grasp holding on to a feather. The amber dates to the middle of the Cretaceous, so that feather did not belong to a modern bird. That feather belonged to a dinosaur. Erican Museum of Natural History has an article about this find where it's noted that they don't know what kind of dinosaur the feather belonged to. It was not a chicken. Promise you was not a chicken. I don't know that anything with feathers would not have been a modern bird. At the time. There may have been very bird like dinosaurs, but you know, we're talking Archaeopteryx maybe, which I don't know if that was a Cretaceous dinosaur or not, but plenty of other dinosaurs had feathers. That's something that they're still studying and we're learning more about all the time. I almost feel like we should have something that we design, not you and I, but society that one day a year and you're not going to be told when it is, and it'll be a very small area, so you're just very unlucky if you're there at the time. A massive amount of amber is just dropped from the sky and that way we can just be like, and that's what a day in the life here was in a million years. Oh okay, So when you say when you said amber, I thought you meant like rocks, like already hardened amber. You mean tree sap, Yeah, I like, yeah, whatever, they're hardened cool to amber. Yeah. I mean if someone has makes the same mistake you did when I put the order in, we might just have a bunch of dead people. Yeah, we're people regardless. Yeah, we might just have a bunch of crushed things. Yes, And uh, you know that's just what experimentation is. Yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta break a few eggs there. It is crack a few skulls to freeze a society and amber. But it would be cool to freeze I guess we do that with photographs. Now we don't need to amber five people. That's true, although you can't pull DNA front well, you can't really pull DNA from amber anyway, because most of it doesn't survive very long. I think the high life is it's not like uh, drastic park. No, it's not, although there is, there's there's a weird company. It's always fed to us. He's like making colossal firal wolves and ship. Well, what are using what are they using? Colossal is is using much much, much more recently extinct species. There's a reason they haven't attempted dinosaurs. You know, they're attempting things that have died out within the past, you know, ten thousand years, maybe five thousand years people have on the last We'll ask and you know, I don't know. I've seen stuff that says genetic material the half life of genetic material is like five hundred years or something five hundred and twenty one years. But there are also discussions in this episode of finding remnants of genetic material, so maybe some of it can survive longer than others. But the point is we're not pulling. We can't drill into these ticks and remove enough dino DNA to go clone a dinosaurs. What you're saying is you're not interested in investing in my surprise liquefied amber. Well, day of the year. We can discuss, all right. So we don't know what kind of dinosaur the feather belonged to, but the tick was an extinct species that these scientists named Dinocraton dracouli or Dracula's terrible tick. Oh wow, they dote on them for fucking dying though the ticks are just seeing themselves out. Oh yeah, this type of tick. Yeah, I wish all their ticks would take note. They didn't seem too much larger than modern ticks to my But one specimen of this ancient eractid was frozen in time after it fed, and it was in gorged with so much blood that it had grown to eight times its normal size. Did you watch Alien Earth? I didn't. You've asked me this like ten times. I don't particularly like the show. You say that every time. There is part of why I haven't watched it. There is a tic esque mosquito ass alien, not alien like a xenomorph, but just not of our not of Earth alien mmmm, that feeds on blood or whatever, and they get so big. Yeah, and I'm just like, go ROAs, no, thank you. Yeah. Anything that gets like engorged with blood is like just so gross to me. Yeah, I've definitely. Have you ever when you were a kid, did you ever see those little red mites that they have the crawl around sometimes that they have you mean earth, Yeah, there's my MyAnna had this pile like these rocks out by her mailbox and they were always covered in these little red mites and if you crushed them, they left like a little red stain. And I, oh, I remember that. I thought they were just kind of red ant, So maybe they weren't. They might have been. I know what you're talking about. This, I remember just like leaving ancient like cave paintings of stains on our driveway. Yes, with these things body internals, Yeah, I haven't thought of it a long time. Yeah I don't. I'm glad you know what I'm talking about, because for a second I was like, wait, was my grandmother just letting me play in like a parasite pit? And probably ticks when they feed. This is sort of an aside, but they can inflate up to fifty times stop it their original volume fifty times two hundred to six hundred times their body. Wait a centimeters, what're talking inches? Do they ever get to the point where we're like, that's a huge fucking. Tick kind of Yeah. Depending on the species, they can swell anywhere from the size of a poppy seed or a sesame seed to between the size of a pea and a grape. A grape, a grape, a fucking grape. Now, I don't know if that's hard ticks or soft ticks that can be soft to expand, like, yeah, but grow not a shower. Is that there's a level of accuracy in that Alien Earth episode that starts so much bigger, you know, Yeah. The one that was on my butt was not that big. I imagine a tick for a tick to get the size of a grape, I assume that tick has been there for a very long butt blood that's swollen on butt blood. This was a pretty cool fine too. A second amber specimen contained two ticks in case side by side lovers lovers. Lovers were they wanted to die together. They held each other, They held each other. On these ticks. Researchers identified tiny hairs from the larva of what are called skin beetles that today typically eat skin hair, feathers, and other traces of organic material left behind in nests. Since no mammal hairs have yet been found in cretaceous amber, this suggests that these skin beetles and the tick were active in a nest belonging to feathered dinosaurs, and they think nest and that this was some sort of a feeding in place situation because it was so wildly rare to find two ticks in case together. If they were just they wouldn't necessarily be feeding on the same animal and then both get incased in animal. It's a solitary feed normally, well. An animal can have more than one tick, but for but for them to have been encased in amber, the amber has to have dream tree sap has to have run down over them, which is hard to do if you're attached to a moving animal. Also, I don't know how fast tree sap moves. It doesn't seem super fast. So it's a little bit like that Austin power is like just move slow, yeah, like the slow steamroller thing. But it's just them too, being like it's kind on. Then it's like shot of it so far away still, so you're saying that one was eating a feather the other one was probably eating something else. Well, the idea being that whatever whatever these skin beetles and ticks were gathered around was probably something solitary. Oh, they were not two ticks. There were two ticks and skin beetles. Oh, so altogether they were at the same party. Y. Yeah, they're all the same party. In that party got in case the ambers. So it's likely that that party was not. Moving, gotcha, So it would be a nest. Yeah. So if you look at the pictures of ticks in the article, you should, all of you should. You won't sleep, but you should go look at the pictures. It does. It sure doesn't seem like these ticks look very different than the tics we have today. In fact, to me, they look exactly the same, which suggests that I think evolution really kind of hit a home run when it game the tall that they You know, there's not a lot of animals that have survived from the time of the dinosaurs being exactly the same. You know, sharks, I guess, alligators. But ticks have also been spreading the same diseases that they do today for millions and millions of years. And we know this because we not only have evidence of ancient ticks. It turns out some of these ticks contain the fossilized remains of the bacteria that causes lime disease. So this is from entomology today. Quote. The findings were made by researchers from Oregon State Universe who studied fifteen to twenty million year old amber from the Dominican Republic that offers the oldest fossil evidence ever found of Borellia, a type of spiroshet like bacteria that to this day causes lime disease. Quote. A series of four ticks from Dominican amber were analyzed in the study, revealing a large population of spiroshite like cells that most closely resemble those of the present day Borellia species. Bacteria are an ancient group that date back about three point six billion years, almost as old as the planet itself. As soft bodied organisms, they are rarely preserved in the fossil record. However, amber is a free flowing tree sap that can trap and preserve material in exquisite detail as it slowly turns into a semi precious mineral. Yeah, people have amber jewelry and stuff, so I guess it's pretty wild. Yeah, very versatile. Yeah. The article goes on to say that scientists have documented the ancient presence of such diseases as malaria, leich Mania, and others. Amber is just thinking about right now. But Amber as a thing is like a hey, do you want to keep this? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah. But for everything, it was like do you want to keep this disease? You want to keep this animal? He do you want to keep this person? In Ed's invention, I thought you meant it's something that people find and go, hey, should we keep this? No? I mean Amber. Actually the personification of Amber is like, hey, where were we going? Did you want to I'll hang on to it for you. Yeah, it's a pack rat type. Yeah, substance. It's pretty wild. Thank god for it. We found a lot. We know a lot about the ancient world from these. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, evidence even suggests, and I don't know if I don't think this evidence was necessarily pulled from ancient ticks, but evidence even suggests that dinosaurs could have been infected with Ricket seal pathogens, which is today known as Rocky Mountain spotted fever. So one of those diseases we talked about earlier is something that the dinosaurs might have had. If dinosaurs could talk, a lot of them would be like, you don't look so good right now. I think you should light out. Can you even imagine? And the diseases the dinosaurs. Had and not one doctor. And not one doctor just misery. Yeah, anyway, what's humans came around? Ticks were eating good. Cultures around the world have been aware of and disgusted by ticks since the beginning of written records, as they should be. The first written record has saw something today. IW I'm disgusting. I'm fucking going home. The usual suspects all had something to say about ticks. Aristotle in three pot fifty five PC in his Historia and Amalium, stated that quote, tics are generated from couch grass, which is more of that spontaneous. Generation stuffmunculus stuff. Yeah, that flies were birthed from shit because that's where the eggs were laid. I gotta get all this shit in common here so we can find out how many ticks we can make. Yeah. Uh. If you want to understand that joke andnot just be grossed out by it, go listen to the Homoculous episode. To be grossed out by that. Pliny in eighty seventy seven in his Historia Naturalism. Pliny, Okay, I thought you were just adding a stroke or something, No, Pliny, so it will be an episode. Pliny in eighty seventy seven in his Historia Naturalis, referred to quote an animal living on blood with its head always fixed and swelling, being one of the animals which has no exit in parentheses anus for its food. It bursts with over repletion and dies from actual nourishment. Okay. Ancient Egyptians wrote of a disease that they knew of as tick fever as early as fifteen fifty BC, and archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian painting of a hyena like animal in a Western Thebes tomb, showing what appeared to be three distinct ticks. Guess where in its ear? Ah? Also, why did you draw that? Well? Clearly, I probably because someone loved their dog. Homer mentions fleas or ticks and flees in the Odyssey What Odysseus returns home his dog is covered in them. So I think people, you know, they knew that their animals, whether they love them or they just happened to be around that. This was something that like afflicted there. Yeah, I'm just saying, you have this is your one opportunity to draw a portrait of your dog, and you leave out the fucking ticks. Yeah, back then I think maybe they were after they wanted to make sure that there was a recording of this stuff. Well then fucking put some tree sap on. It, dipping your dog's head and tree saund like we're gonna get these things off. I we had some work done around here at my house and it was the worst some of the some of the worst crafts with ship I've seen. Uh. And the people who painted just zero fox, like doesn't matter what they taped. Shit's just everywhere, Like everything's way where it shouldn't be paint wise. Yeah, and I am finding like spiders in carbonite, Like just rolled paint over a spider and there it is just like a full blown spider, Like you can make out what it was. There was like tape on the wall that's just like in there now Like so I just to your point, it's not amber. But I walk around my house now being like there's Han solo and carbonite. There's Han solo and carbonite, there's on salt garbonite. If your house survives hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps buried under a soot cloud or something, maybe those spiders will become what are studied. In the future, they'll be like, God, this craftsmanship was. They should already be studying the shit that blows out of the pipe in the backyard that they refuse to fix. Well, But in the future they might think They'll be like, wow, these were decorative. These were placed here as a memorial to these spiders. They must have been royal spiders. Man, I don't know this house already survived every earthquake. It's from nineteen twenty. That's true. I do. This is a complete aside, But sometimes when I drive around LA, I do like to think about how you know, I am super anxious and nervous about earthquakes, but you look at the majority of the houses in LA have survived a number of very large earthquakes. Just fine. But the best ancient ticks story that I found is a Navajo legend about how ticks became so flat. Hold on to your butts, as they say, this story is a journey, and you will not see the answer to the question of how did ticks become flat. You won't see it coming, but it's a great story. I do love a culture unable to say I don't know. They had to have it how flat you. I'd be like, I don't know, and then they're like, oh man, we better come up with something that we pass on for generations of how ticks got flat. This story is like a final destination level version of how a tick becomes flat. Never guess it. You'll never guess, but it's awesome. So one day, Coyote was wandering down a trail when he met old woman. Don't go that way. She warned him there's a giant up ahead who kills everyone. But Coyote, being coyote, wasn't scared. Giants don't frighten me. He said, I killed giants all the time. Holy shit, straight of coyote. I never knew wow, which oh well, which the story says was not true. He had never met one. So I guess coyotes being tricksters just. Lies about Coyote the animal, not a person named Coyote. Capital c Coyote, Kyote. Lear the spirit you want to get in trouble. The mythic embodiment of coyote. Coyote was a was a figure in Native American legends. He was a trickster figure. It's not ordering from acme no, okay, so I will stop picturing that right now. Giants don't frighten me, he said, I killed giants all the time, which was not true. He had never met one. Still, he kept walking along the way. He found a big fallen branch and picked it up like a club. I'll smash the giant over the head with this, he said. Eventually, coyote came to what looked like a huge cave in the middle of the path. He walked right in. Inside he found a woman crawling on the ground, starving and too weak to stand. What happened to you, Coyote asked, rude, how else will we know I'm trapped? She said, we all are great, cold, open to something. But I was thinking that trapped where The woman looked at him and laugh, You're already inside the giant. Coyote didn't understand. He thought he'd walked into a cave. But the cave was the giant's mouth, and now Coyote was deep inside its belly. Oh. He kept going and found more people lying around, half dead from hungrybos. The laziest of the They couldn't even they couldn't even munch on the innards of the giant. Wow. They told him there was no way out. The giant's belly was so enormous it filled an entire valley. Coyote thought about this and said, if we're inside the giant, then these cave walls must be meat. So he pulled out his knife and started cutting. Chunks came loose from the walls, fat and flesh from the inside of the giant's stomach. Coyote fed it to the starving people a whalefall bay. Basically, we're looking at you, Daniel Krause Kyote. Coyote fed it to the starving people, and they grew stronger. But now they had another problem. Again great writing, plot. Wise, Yeah, yeah, problem. They were still inside the giant, so coyote decided to kill it from the inside. This stick is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Well, he thought the stick was going to be great for clubbing it over its head, but he didn't foresee anticipate that he would walk right into its mouth. So he asks, where's its heart? Someone pointed to a mountain in the distance deep inside the giant's body. It was pulsing and smoking like a volcano. That must be it, Coyote said, clearly, not a doctor. Kyo has interrational confidence. This guy would do well in Hollywood. Absolutely. He climbed to the giant's heart and began cutting into it. The giant felt the pain and spoke Coyote. It said, I know who you are. Stop cutting me and I'll open my mouth. You can all leave. But Coyote didn't stop. No, Coyote. He hacked deeper. Struck. He hacked deeper into the heart until lava began pouring out. That lava was the Giant's blood. The giant groaned. The whole world inside him shook. The ground trembled under everyone's feet. Coyote shouted run. The giant opened his mouth for one last breath, and all the people trapped inside came rushing out. But the last one through was wood Tick. As wood Tick tried to escape, the giant's teeth came crashing down, Coyote grabbed him and yanked him out just in time. Wood Tick survived, but he was crushed flat. Look at me, cried would Tick. I'm all flat now. Coyote shrugged that happened when I pulled you through. From now on, you'll always be flat, but be glad you're alive. What I'm that. The craziest thing is the tick is introduced so late in the story, only only. Part of the storytelling. It feels like a real cop out. Yes, this feels like somebody asked their grandfather, how did the wood Tick become flat? He just started I'm telling a story. Oh, He's like, I was already working on this coyote thing. Yeah, how can I put this into the coyote thing? Yes? Yes, that is wild. That's uh. It's just such a crazy It's like a ce story character that we meet for one second in a movie and then you're like, oh, the hero, but like the movies called wood Tick and you're like, oh, that guy who passed and asked for a coffee. Well, it would be like at the end of Scream if they pulled the mask off and it was just a character you hadn't met yet, you'd be like. Who didn't know? Yeah, who was that one? Yeah, it's just like, oh, well all right. I mean it's not really fair from a story perspective, but. Yeah, everything else leading up to this was amazing. I'm very interested in what coyote is going to do next. Yeah, but they're like, here's a character. The rest of the movies will be following this other guy. Yes, so we introduced at the end. So that's how. That's how wood ticks became flat. According to the Navajo. I mean, it's a great story. A lot of it was very good. So maybe wood tick was glad to be alive after this, but no one else was. Ticks are the world's number one spreader of zoonotic diseases, or diseases that's spread between animals and humans, and they seem to be one of the few creatures on Earth that are more trouble than they're worth. Get them out of here. Though, there are at least a handful of ticks that qualify as an endangered species stop it. None are represented on the International Union of. Giving a Shit. No, none are represented on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of threatened Species, which does feel like a real fuck you to the tick community. Yeah, some scientists know that this isn't so much because everybody feels that ticks are worthless, but because these endangered ticks feeding habits are inextricably linked to other endangered species. Oh jeez. So one such case is the Heath's possum tick, which is Australian tick which survives exclusively on the mountain pygmy possum living above the snow line on some of Australia's highest peaks. So because of its highly isolated habitat and its precarious reliance on a single host that is also threatened, it is considered on the brink of extinction. This was not flat out said, but I assume part of the difficulty there is the only way to keep it alive is to feed it endangered animals. Yeah, so they're kind. Of like, it's kind of like you wouldn't even be on the list if it wasn't for these Yeah, they are so connected to that particular type of possum that even if they wanted to, I guess they wouldn't be able to introduce a new kind of food to that tick. Yeah, so they're fucked. Yeah, we're not gonna air lift up some goats for you people to feed on, like right, but as an inconvenient place. I hope that. The ticks aren't the reason that the possum are endangered they're being fed on by. Yeah, I don't know, and I'm never gonna know. You fine with that, We're never going to look into it, never Once. Biologists aren't the only ones wrestling with the inherent value of a tick's life. The Innocence Project is now they didn't do it. One Christian philosopher wrote, quote, certainly Job should have included tics in his litany of complaints to the Most High concerning the evils visit upon humans in the created world. It is hard to imagine the wisdom and any patience we might be called upon to exercise regarding the existence of tics. No one should be on his shit list to them because we have them. He probably brought to the little fucks. Well, I mean, maybe two snuck on on the backs of some endangered possums or something. I didn't know how many trojan horses were on that arc. It's funny, though, in my research I actually found, and this is one of the only times this has happened in the course of this show, I actually found quite a few Christians asking why God would have created tics, Like most of the Bible, most other yeah, most other horrible subjects. I don't find you know a lot my rapists. Yeah, like age list of Christian philosophers or writers being like, what's the deal with ticks? But you know one of them wonders, I think, And this sort of speaks for many of them that I read. Many may ask why these ticks species are so infectious when ticks were originally designed by a benevolent God. Why would a good creator choose to design a creature ultimately capable of such considerable virulence? Boredom? Probably? I mean it's a goof. It's a goof sometimes God goofs. Look. I invented caves, and I feel like no one was using them until I added rain, and so maybe it's like a knock on effect for God. Well, but he filled those caves with soft ticks. Well, because the ticks kept complaining they had nothing to do, That's true, and so he's like, well, where you've been hanging out? I was like, in the caves, no one's ever in here, And He's like, I got an idea rain that'll bring them in there. Still not good enough? All right, Finally I put blood in them. I do like the idea of God being very collaborative. The answer that most of these Christian writers settled on is that the idea that before Adam and Eve sinned, ticks were good. Okay, like all animals. So you don't hear back from the big guy and you come up with a not as interesting story as ticks being flattened by a giant mouth. Yeah, they think the ticks were probably good. But after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, there's this quote from the Bible. God told Adam that his sin would result in the ground being cursed and bringing forth thorns and thistles, which prompts another Christian writer to ask, what exactly did this corruption and curse mean? Did thorns and thistles become more prevalent and more of a problem. Could the same thing apply to ticks? That's what are the two ways to read the Constitution? There's like an originalist, so the originalist and not interpretation. And then whatever the fuck this guy is? Yeah, where it was like, I told you it's thorns and thistles. Don't add ticks as you got a because no, Well, in today's society, you know, tics are a bigger problem than So that's what I think God meant. I mean, we're not here doing an episode on thorns or thistles, exactly, dude. But we should be. But we're gonna do Scared of the Bible. We'll do every chapter. Oh, that'll be over twenty years, actually twenty chapters. Right, we already we made this joke of off show. But we did think about Somebody told me reading it. Yeah, somebody said we should do audiobooks, and I was saying we should do we. Read the Bible. Yeah, and not as a joke. Scared all the time version of the Bible. That's just the scary, gross parts, just the scary parts from the Bible, which we're doing now. So it's trademarked. Yeah, but fear not in the end times, after Christ returns, this same writer believes that quote, the curse will be reversed and dangerous wild animals like wolves, leopards, lions, and cobras will no longer be dangerous. I'm sorry, I haven't gotten that far into the Bible. Perhaps, but where does it say the second Coming of Christ that he has the obligation to make scary things not scary and to make ticks nice again. Well, okay, so this doesn't eOne discuss it with him? Well, this is literally so This is a little confusing the way I phrased it. The writer believes what I just said. But what I just said is a quote from Isaiah eleven, verse six through eight. So the curse will be reversed and dangerous, while the animals like wolves, leopards, lines, and cobras will no longer be dangerous. Is a quote from the Bible. So is they shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, which is verse nine of Isaiah eleven. And so then the writer ads, could this also apply to mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks? I sure, hope. So. I love it. This guy is looking for anything that he can lump them in with the It's okay, it's not gonna work with that many even I get it. But fine, this is its own thing. What if have you seen Isaiah? What if he means this is also ticks? Yeah? I love the idea that something we have to look forward to in the end times is that after all the death and destruction and people being taken into heaven, is that ticks revert to just. Being cool after we're all gone. Yeah, they're just fine. I find that very interesting. I maybe they used to smell good. They revert to smelling good. It's just so reverse the curse. Isn't amazing reverse the curse. It's very fun thing to say. I wish we could reverse the curse on this show and all the horrible things that we've caused by talking about them. Yeah, I'm keep waiting for the doorball to ring. And it's just a huge tick. As we discussed earlier, many of the ancient new ticks were trouble, but it wasn't until eighteen ninety three that two researchers named Theobald Smith and fl Kilbourne discovered that a disease known as Texas cattle fever that was killing tons of cattle in the Midwest was caused by the blood born parasite Babesia bigamina, which was transmitted by the cattle tick. This is generally considered the first scientifically described tick disease, and ranchers rejoiced when they finally had an explanation for what was killing their cattle and that they could finally work to stop it. Okay, Previous to that, it was just a lot of theology theologians being like, oh vu, there's a way to stop it. When Jesus comes back and says, hey, stop it. Well, and then these guys were like, think it might be a better way to do this. The Egyptians knew about tick fever in the fifteen hundred BC or whatever, and I read that. I thought that was just a people's enthusiasm about clocks. I thought it was their enthusiasm for ticks. The whole all of. King Tut's domain had to tick fear. Dude that summer, never forget it. A lot of thin people, they were all blood heavy. No. People knew that ticks spread disease for a long time, but they just didn't have the actual scientific understanding of there's a parasite in the blood that goes from one thing to another. They just thought ticks were somehow poisonous. And Craig Kilbourne, whoever these guys' names are, eighteen ninety three, that's what I was about to say. I'm like, it's got to be bumping up against the twentieth century because we as we know didn't even know that, like germs were a thing. Yeah yeah. Texas cattle fever, though, is not one of the tick diseases that makes headlines. The first on everyone's list is lime disease, which is the most common disease spread by ticks in the country. The CDC estimates somewhere between three hundred thousand and half a million Americans get diagnosed with the lime disease every year. And this is this is your moment to shine. What do you know about lime disease beingsabilitating? Yes, it's debilitating. It it's and it's well. First off, it's from Connecticut. Named after Connecticut. That's why I'm giving you this opportunity. Yeah, Connecticut is like the Vatican for lime disease. It's the nutmeg state has a tick problem and the disease at which probably East Lime one of them. We've stayed in East Slime. We stayed there with Alex's family. Oh oh yeah, he lives in Lime. Yeah, one of the limes Eastern. I don't know whe other directions are, but we live. We were up there. They have a fun little old time like Charlie Chaplin movie theater and shit mm hmm. I just know it's real bad business man like I know, it can be very debilitating. I don't know if there's varying degrees of it, but you know, we know you find some people who it's like progressively debilitating. It's almost like a mass or something. I feel like when you get limes disease. That's all. That's all correct. It's very bad, and it's from. When's it from? Well, because I mean I was it around when I was a kid. It was okay, So the tick fear in Connecticut that I had the like Boogeyman tick syndrome of like check for tics, check for ticks. Lime disease was already a thing that people were like, that's why you're checking for tics. Yes, okay, although or not, although and not only was it a thing that people had become that people were aware of when you were a kid. Lime disease, as you'll remember from the discussion we had a little bit earlier. We know it's been around for millions of years. Yes, I fucked that up. Huh, it's we know because they found it that amber. Ed ed pays somewhere between fifty and seventy five percent attention from I'm. Just saying that, like that shit from amber wasn't called lime disease. Well, correct, it wasn't. It was part of the bacteria that makes up lime disease. They found an amber, yes. Which comes into play a little bit later. That's important. But do you want to guess who else probably suffered from lime disease? A famous famous name discussed on the show a couple of times. Plato, No, no, no, you're probably not going to get this lot, Si the iceman. Is there anything this guy doesn't have on display? Not much. I feel like we've learned most of human history from what we discovered on them. And God, the sickest man got frozen. He's he's fifty three hundred years old. He was murdered. We know he had those arrow in him. Yeah, there's an arrow. They don't know who killed him or why. Yeah, but he was murdered. He was spreading disease. Yeah. Another really interesting detail in his story that came up as I was researching this episode is that when scientists sequenced his genome, they also searched for traces of any non human DNA. They found evidence of a few different microbes in or on his body, including the bacteria that causes lime disease, Borellia BERGDORFERI. Adding to the evidence that he was actually suffering symptoms are his numerous tattoos, which I think we might know. Yeah, the tattoos may have been medical and nature, like pointing to where he was itchy, or pointing to where. Yes, they are clustered around his spine, ankles, and behind his right knee, which are all places where you would experience the joint pain that lime disease can cause. So some some people think that perhaps they weren't decorative, but they were almost like a ritualistic Neolithic medicinal practice. Yeah, now, who listens to all that shit you did? That was pretty good. While Utsy's corpse is the oldest known evidence of lime infection in humans, it wasn't understood as a disease until a bunch of kids and a few adults in and around Old Lime. Stole on the body from where eat it. The biggest mistake they could ever made. Well, they heard that mummies make you look young or whatever. They thought it was a mummy powder. So it was old lime, Connecticut. I don't know where that is in relation to East Lime. I don't know either. I mean, if this is where it started, it should be called we don't go there, no more lime. Well, this group of people started coming down with what looked like juvenile rheumatoried darth, writing East lime. Is where our friend lives, which is why I always think he's right. Yeah, I don't know where old lime is than in the trash because I ain't eaten no old lime. Get it out of here. These people started coming down with what looked like juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in nineteen seventy five, so this was not really studied until just a few years before you were born. Shit man, They had the work swollen, joints, fevers weird. So joints is a big thing. Joints is a big thing. So that's why when I thought earlier it was debilitating in like an MS way, where like I thought of MS because it's like a breakdown of the ability. To yeah, to walk some some people who get. And so it might not be the same symptoms that are actually making it happen, but I know that some people they need to require like walkers and things like that. Yes, two moms, Polly Murray and Judith Minch shark tank and said do we have an idea for you. It's called tattoos that heal you. Two moms, Polly Murray and Judith Minch started calling Yale and the Connecticut Health Department. So they finally got two Yale rheumatologists, Alan Steer and Stephen Malowista, and these two came to investigate. They pieced together that whatever this is, it was spread by ticks, and they named it lime arthritis. But it wasn't until nineteen eighty one that Willie Bergdorffer, a Swiss trained medical entomologist working at Rocky Mountain Labs in Hamilton, Montana, found the true cause of the disease, wriggling around in the gut of a deer tick from Shelter Island. Wait, gut, Oh, so the inside the tick in blood. Yeah, Inside the gut of the tick where the blood was he found this corkscrew shaped bacterium called a spiral keet, and in nineteen eighty two he confirmed that this spiral heat was the cause of lime. I think I actually mispronounced spiro keet earlier in this episode as like spiroshet or something. It's spirokeet getting better, guys, I'm getting better, spiro Shelley a year spiroshet. He sounds like a great pasta. Sounds like a delicious kind of pasta. Yeah. A year later, this bacteria that he discovered was named Brellia bergder Ferry in his honor. I hope they threw him as well. Yeah, remember Willie's name. We're gonna come back to him later. But part of the reason the disease was such a mystery for so long is that most people who come down with lime don't even know that they were bit by a tick. Yeah. Now, isn't there like a ring associated with it? Yes, but I feel like by the time you see that, it's probably too late. Well, it's not that it's too late, it's just that, well, it's you're already infected. Yeah. It's called a bullseye rash. And it looks like a bright red ring. It's a rash in the shape of a ring, and the center of that ring, it won't be red in the center, but the center of that is where the tick bite occurred. That is crazy, the ring. It's just crazy that our body had that reaction, or that this thing gave that to bodies. Yes, where it's like, I'm sorry about what I did to your body, and now now you know it's happened. Yeah, and I'm gonna leave, by the way, I've already left. Yeah, left a long time ago. Usually, But it's just pretty wild. It's just an interesting piece of evolution or intelligent design, whatever it may be. It's just kind of crazy that it left like a circle, yeah, where it ruined your life. And twenty percent of cases never even get the circle. Twenty to thirty percent of cases never get the circle, and so they may never know that they were bit by a tick. They don't see the rash, and so they just get flu like symptoms and they get the joint pain, sometimes long term neurological and cardiac problems, and in rare cases, the infection, the bacterial infection spreads to the heart and can become fatal, but it's usually caught well before that, especially now that we know what it is. Once it's caught, it can be treated with a ten to fourteen day course of antibiotics that cleans up cases in most people. Then there's chronic lime disease, which is part of what you've been discussing, and that is the term for patients who continue to suffer symptoms for months or years after their body is clear of the Borellia bacteria. There is a whole big controversy around chronic lime that touches really similar territory to our Morgallon's episode that we just did, so we won't get into the whole thing. But I found a quote from infectious disease specialists Jake Scott who told Stanford Medicine quote, when patients tell me about ongoing fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulties, I believe them completely. These symptoms are real and debilitating, but the science shows us they aren't caused by persistent line bacteria, so we need to look for other treatable causes. So basically, a lot of times when someone has chronic lime, they check to see if there's any of these bacteria in the body. There aren't, and now there's a question of. Well, what do we do, because we know how to get rid of the bacteria, right, but we don't know how to get rid of whatever right. And so there's still a mystery as to does the bacteria change something in some people's bodies so that this becomes an ongoing problem. There's some people who believe that these bacteria have an ability to like essentially like hibernate in your in your tissues, and and after over a certain period of time, they come back out and they cause problems. And then when doctors go to look for them. They rehibernate or whatever. There's there's a lot of theories as to like what's really going on, some of them more grounded in reality than others. But I do believe that a lot of doctors understand that something is going on and they just don't they don't know how to treat it. My dad actually told me at least that he suffered from chronic lime disease in when I was like end of high school through college. He was struggling with something and I wasn't home very much, so I wasn't around him. But I remember him saying that it was a tick problem and he thought it was ongoing lime. And but then for him, once he moved back to Italy, it seems like a cleared up. So I guess it wasn't. I guess it wasn't. You know, I don't know. I don't know. You have a family member suffering from this, so you know people well, family friends, family friends. So all that said, lime disease is not really the scariest disease you can get from a tick. There are worse ones. The scariest one I found in my recent search is called poassin disease named after Poasin, Ontario, where the first known case is They identified in nineteen fifty eight, a five year old boy from a nearby town developed severe encephalitis, which is like swelling of the brain and died or I guess is it swelling or is it you get like liquid in your brain. Either one can kill you. It sounds like during his autopsy doctors were able to isolate the virus from his brain and study it for decades after that. Poasin was just basically sort of this footnote. It was like a curiosity. It was in textbooks, but it almost never showed up in people. It's one of those things where Doctor House at the end of the episode was yeah, maybe it's Poassi. Yeah, but also that thing, I think there's like a real term for it that doctors have where it's like it's probably not the craziest most obscure thing. First, like it's probably just strepped through you know what I mean, Like, don't go straight to like it might it's fucking fasciitis or whatever. I was like, Nah, it probably isn't. From nineteen fifty eight to nineteen ninety eight, there was less than one human case per year year across the US and Canada. Okay, but then in the early two thousands it started showing up more often and worse. Oh my god, like low rise genes. Yeah, exactly. So four things make poasens genuinely the most frightening disease I think that you can get from a tick. The first is a transmission speed. So per the Vermont Department of Health, one study showed that an infected tick can transmit poassens in as little as fifteen minutes. Lime disease, by comparison, typically requires twenty four to thirty six hours of being attached to the host. Question though, if it's attached, if a lime disease tick jumps on you, does its whole fucking at home surgery? Yeah, and then you grab its ass after twenty minutes, Could it have done it in that twenty minutes or are you in the clear because it takes like three hours. It just it doesn't matter, right because the bacteriy you can get in at any moment. But I don't know. That's the question is like, like, if you get a tick out off your ass in like in the day you found it, are you probably go with lime disease? Like he didn't get it in there. Correct, it's unlikely that it would transfer in less than twenty four hours. Okay, with Poassin's by the time you notice the tick, you probably have the disease. But almost no one ever has this. He's just like it comes from lazy ticks, well, who are just like, can't be bothered to write. Someone people used to never have it. You're saying it's on the rise, like the g Yeah, so who's getting now? Just everybody? Lots more people, Yeah, lots more people. And what was that? What happens when you get that? You turned into a tick? That brings me to point number two? Fucking better or not be what I just said? It's not okay, it's a little worse. Oh no. When Poassin becomes severe, which is about ten percent. Of cases, remember ten acting tough acting? In fact that acting was it fast acting as well at one point in this case is fact as facts acting Potassin. Poe Assin poet. Either way, we're gonna have to dig up John Madden for this. When Poeasin goes severe, it goes catas traphic. Most cases are asymptomatic or just appear to be mild. Flu Symptoms might include fever, headache, nausea, occasional confusion, and weakness. With severe poacid illness, victims should be hospitalized because the symptoms can worsen. If not treated, symptoms can extend to meningen meningitis basically meninginocephalitis. There we go, okay. If not treated, symptoms can extend to meninginocephalitis, which may include seizures, aphasia, cranial nerve policies, paralysis, and altered mental states. About ten percent of cases go neuroinvasive, which means the virus crosses the blood brain barrier and per the. Same I don't even have that barrier to keep this shit out, I'm saying. But if it doesn't work, that works. Most of the time. But when I mean, that's the same thing that the brain eating domba we talked about. Yeah, those amibas have to cross the blood brain barrier to get to your brain, and the quickest way is up through your schnauzo man. So about ten percent of cases go neuinvasive. At about ten percent of those die and roughly half of the survivors are left with permanent neurological damage. So it is tough acting finase, it's. Tough acting, fast acting John Madden bad as in poacin, Damn Dude, muscle weakness, paralysis, memory problems, and personality changes. I have this. Every time we do an episode. I'm always like I have it. Regellance can all result from this permanent neurological damage. And as I mentioned, this disease is getting worse. There is less than one case per year up until nineteen ninety eight. From twenty six to twenty sixteen, that climb to nine per year, and Maine has had four poass in deaths alone in the past decade, including one as recently as twenty. Twenty four coming over the border. And there is still no treatment, no vaccine, nothing can be done. The treatment Yell Medicine describes is quote supportive, meaning they basically put you out of ventilator and they manage your brain swelling and hope you survive. That is that is worse? I would say it's worse because a lot more people get lime and it could maybe be knocked up by steroids. Sounds like every person who gets this diets for it. That's it, Bud, Sorry, well you got bit ten percent? Is that's it? Oh, it's like online dating numbers, got it, but pretty small the top in anything. If it swipes right on breaking your blood brain barrier though, you're you're definitely going to have a bad time. It's not going to be a good Okay. Okay, I I had thought that that nine cases were all dead zo's or like ventilator. Oh, that's a good question. Well, Maine has had four poassin deaths in the past decade. I don't know if the number of cases that are mentioned here we're all fatal or not. It doesn't mention if any were or not. But in any case, the disease is becoming more widespread. So Amibas are moving north, yeah, and tough act in. Poassin is coming south Canada down and then Amimbas are coming from the south up north. It's spreading everywhere. So where I don't know, I tell you this, but Kansas, you're you're being You're in a war on two fronts. You don't even realize it. Well, the third disease we're going to cover is also coming from the south of North, So Kansas is gonna get ding double duty here. Okay, Alpha gal We're back to our main gal Alpha. Gal Alpha gal Gado. It's less fatal. The good the good ed had to say, alpha gal gado the way that some people just have to sneeze. Is this third disease I want to cover is less fatal than poassi ins and bore, probably less fatal than lime, but it is definitely the weirdest on this list. So now you're getting turned into a tick. I actually thought that this was when I first read this, I was like, oh, this is like a more gallons thing. This is like maybe it's real, maybe it's not, but it's it's real. It turns out real. It turns out one hundred percent real. There is a tick in the United States that if it bites you can leave you permanently allergic to red meat, not just beef, pork, lamb, tenison, any kind of mammal meat in general, and in many patients dairy as well. The resulting allergic reaction can range from rashes and hives to nausea to full on anaphylactic shock that requires hospitalization, and in twenty twenty four we had the first fatal case that struck a man who died a few hours after eating a hamburger. It sounds more like a wizard's curse than a real disease. This don't. I'm trying to like wrap my hand around it. But according to the CDC, which I feel like is something we've said a lot in this episode. It's called alpha gal syndrome and it works like this. So quote this is what the CDC says. Alpha gal is a sugar molecule that is naturally produced in the bodies of most mammals, but not in people. It can also be found in the saliva of some ticks. So when that tick bites you, it transfers alpha gal from its saliva into your blood, and the body's natural defenses or immune system can identify alpha gal as a threat and trigger an allergic reaction. But not right not at the bit. Because they're doing that thing that they do where they fucking put you under hypnosis while. You oh yeah, you're like yes please. The most common they're not the bacteria you're looking for, like Jedi mind trick your white blood cells or whatever. The most common alpha gal carrying tick in the US is a tick we mentioned earlier, the lone Star tick. Now. It is originally from the state of Texas, Okay, but it is not named after the state of Texas. It is named for the fact that it has Each of these ticks has a single white dot on its back that looks like a lone star. So when you're a hammer, everything was like a nail. I guess you're already in Texas. Can you find it? And that's probably where your brain went. But thanks to climate change, which I think is probably the reason a lot of these diseases, the amibas are moving north. On climate change, we're getting warmer winters, longer active tick seasons, and the deer populations are exploding and they often hitch rides on deer, so that has helped the lone Star tick move steadily nor in East. As of twenty twenty six, it is well established in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and showing up as far north as main where a lot of these ticks and tick based diseases are starting to show up. A lot of the grounds going sour is what they say about that place right in uh Pet Cemetery. Yep, yep. The what's his? Herman Monster doesn't matter? It doesn't matter, Yeah, I had he has another quote from that movie. That probably is another name too. That credit as Herman Munster. As according to a twenty twenty three CDC report. Between twenty ten and twenty twenty two, the agency identified roughly one hundred and ten thousand suspected cases of alpha gal in the US, and they note in the same report that the real number is almost certainly higher than that. Do you think In many ways, I always thought of the hamburglar as a person who loves hamburgers and needs to steal them. Presumably the sacramanburgers will be eaten by him later or sold on the black market unclear, But in many ways, these ticks are the ill hamburglars. They're stealing burglars, burglar all of us. Yep. They're stealing the enjoyment of hamburgers, yes, away from their victims. Well, and part of what is crazy that I don't get into really, But what was in the research is that the first rash of cases where people started noticing that something very bizarre was happening was in the South, where people who had spent their whole lives eating lots of red meat and sausages and hamburgers. Okay, barbecue and stuff. Yeah, all of a sudden started getting these wild allergic reactions to me that they never had before. And that's part of what started the investigation into like, what the fuck is going on red meat? I don't I have. I haven't had red meat since October of last year. I have not eaten red meat. Well, i've There's been a few instances for one reason or another, but I generally ninety nine percent of the time have not had red meat since like two thousand and eight. I haven't had it since October, which is the longest patch since the crib. Yeah, and so, but the thing is is that we might be eaten alive nightly by these and we don't even know that's true. You're not testing it. I haven't had a tick bite since two thousand and eight. It that you know of because you're not having anaphylactic shock when you eat a cheeseburger. Have I talked on this show before about the allergic reaction I had when I first met my wife slash now with then the girlfriend. You had an allergic reaction when you first met Anna. Yeah, so it's when I first started. I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't like I met her and had an allergic reaction to her. But it's pretty quiet. The first date, my throat closed uff. I was struggling to breathe. No when I when when we first met, when I first started staying over at her place, I started waking up in the mornings with my lips completely swollen, like borderline anaphylaxis, Like. She was injecting your lips when you slept. It looked like it. It looked like it looked like I was having like I looked like, who's that YouTuber? Couldn't tell you, James Charles, I think. She genuinely doesn't not help me. I don't know who that is. I looked insane in the mornings, and they were itchy, and it was clearly an allergic reaction to something, and I'd never been an alluri just before. Like for months, I was like, because it didn't happen every time that I saw her. It didn't happen like every time that I ate there. It like about every time you stayed over. It happened fairly often when I stayed over, okay, and could not figure out what the fuck was going on. So I went I got tested for all kinds of allergies. Everything came back negative. You were like, damn, girl, wash these sheets. I started. I was leaving with fucking pink eye, and my lips are all like eight times bigger. I was like going around her apartment literally, like looking at objects or foods. At one point, I was like, maybe she had like pink salt instead of like more than she And I was like googling, like can you have allergic reaction to Himalayan pink salt? And like some people could, So I was like, well, maybe I won't use that salt anymore, like could not figure it out. And she she was like she was like I was so worried because I was. She was like, I'd finally met this guy that I was in love with, and it seemed like he was allergic to me somehow. And I was like, no, no. No, your fucking dirty ass. Turns out it was the arm and hammer baking soda toothpaste that she had. And the reason that it was not every night was because she had a there was like a. Couple of reser teeth every once every seven day. No, she just rushes the one she wants to get. It was when I used that toothpaste. But she also had like a crest, like a blue you know, toothpaste, and you know, sometimes they'd be like, oh, I want the minty fresh, right, you know, so I would just do the other one, no crust and so so yeah, I and I don't even remember how I figured that out, but at some point, But. Then, did you have to tell her you can't use it because then if you kiss, you're gonna get all blow up? Like? Oh we she it was funny she had bought. It was to become an Akward Fresh house. No she well, yeah, she'd bought like a fifteen pack at Costco or something. And I was like, in the trash, Yeah, it's going out, and I should I should. I should go look it up again someday because the I forget there was an active ingredient in it. That was the thing that I was allergic to. It wasn't baking soda or whatever, but it. Was the generational wealth. Oh that's what it was. I had arm and ammers, army ammers, Yes, that's his family. It was the it's in whatever the active ingredient is is in other armen Hammer products. Because I remembered years prior, and I hadn't even ever thought about it until this had happened, but I had had a really bizarre allergic reaction to underarm deodorant. Oh, where I was getting these big red welts all under my arms and I don't remember, but I am almost one thousand percent certain that I must have been using an arm and hammer. Because they make that too deodorant. Yeah, so he was now. Old spies. Yeah, but not like the one our dad's had that weird smell. No. I also use old spice, just like a basic old spice, So I'm using some sort of fresh scent. Yeah, exactly. My dad and everyone of his generation had like that little old spice like bottle and it was just fucking the roastest smell to me. Yeah, lot was a loan where I don't know what if that was even what that is necessarily, No, I. Think I don't think old spices. It might have been after shave. Who knows after shave. I was just like, yeah. And so the fact that they figured out there are other smells and have become pretty successful company. Yeah, they had weird commercials. So maybe you can put that up on the patreot. Maybe that's some bonus material for the fans. But pictures of you with bumps on your body, oh. I could give you pictures of me. Well, what is the thing we're putting up the story. We can leave the story in the episode, or you can just cut it out. It's got nothing to do with the rest of the episode, I guess, and I'll definitely I'll after this, I'll show you some of the pictures because I took selfies being like, what is happening to me? So anyway, back to red meat disease. The CDC's best current estimate is that as many as four hundred and fifty thousand Americans might be living with alpha gal syndrome right now without ever having gotten a formal diagnosis. That gap is mostly because the syndrome is so new that doctors out side of heavily effective regions have either never heard of it or have only ever heard of it in passing. So sometimes patients spend years bouncing between specialists without anyone ever connecting the dots to go, oh, hey, did you ever have a tick bite? Or you know, maybe it's that This though, has resulted in an explosion of headlines recently about alpha gal, which is one of the reasons that I ended up doing this episode was I had a few weeks ago I saw some headline about this tick disease and. You're just like you're on some weird forum. It's like, who can I need Hamburgers? Now? Am still hanging out with all my allergy friends. It's starting to become one of the more well known tick or they call them vector based diseases now, which is the term for when like the tick is the vector, it's not actually the cause of the disease, the bacteria in its guts, like. The way bubonic plague with like a rat would be a vector. Yet well the flea would be the vector vessels. I don't know, you know, ask a scientist. But here's the really other bad news and fuck up thing about this alpha gal disease, the alpha gal molecule that your body can then start to have. Once it's introduced, you can start to have this allergic reaction to it. It's not just in food, It's in fucking like everything. Excuse me. It's I thought it was like a weird sugar that other mammals made. It's in meat and dairy. It's in gelatin, which means. Which is in horsebones. Yep, A lot of these things are are animal derived. But so like any gel pill, any gel capsule pill. Is this because you said that the sugar thing is in these other mammals. Yes, so by virtue of their body at any point producing it means that the byproduct of them has It. Is in many of these products. Yes, and you're having allergic reaction, not to red meat necessarily, but to this weird right. Yes, it most often shows up in red meat, but it can show up. In gelatin and gel caps. And gummy vitamins. It's in a compound called magnesium stereiate, which is in basically every supplement on the shelf in every store in America. It's in glycerin based soaps. It's in body washes, it's in some vaccines, it's in snake anti venom. It's in the most it's the most common blood thinner in the world, is called pig derived heeperin, which is a blood thinner. It can be in that. It's in some cow tissue, prosthetic heart valves. It's in surgical sutures, tattoo inks, and contact and contact lens solutions, which is extra crazy because imagine you're an alpha gal patient who needs an important surgery. The antibio the capsules you're antibiotics, or it could send you in anaphylactic shock, the sutures could send you into anaphalactic shock, the heart valve replacement, the all. This has to be in the pit next season. It really should be call us. It is crazy. I know that there are latex versus non latex glove things for like they ask you about that for surgeries and stuff. Yeah, but beyond that, I don't think they're like, hey, would you like us to change everything that we do here? Well, and I don't know for sure, but I wonder if maybe some of these animal based products were derived as latex alternatives in some cases, like you know, they needed a different stretchy thing so they started. I don't know, but it's not good if you have this all of a sudden, just like going to the doctor can become a sounds like. Going into leaving your bed or getting in bed is a problem. Yeah, this is a that's a truly I could see now why it's kind of worse and weirder. Yeah. Yeah, and one of the other crazy things. This is a whole long aside. I ended up cutting it from the episode, but I want to mention it. The investigation into this allergic reaction to alpha gal touches on a whole bunch of other medical science, but the one of the ways that they figured out what was going on. Yeah, it must have been a tough nuts to crack. It was a tough nuts to crack is originally I don't even remember exactly how, but it was originally connected to like a cancer drug that accidentally introduced alpha gall into some people's systems and not led to a whole bunch of allergic reactions. But anyway, basically, the like Sherlock Holmes doc the doctor House who was investigating what was going on, got bit by a tick and developed alpha gala syndrome and that's how he figured it out. That's fucking that's astronauts situation where it's like we've talked about this on other times, where like the original Astronauts, the Mercury Savin or whatever they before they landed on these guys, they were gonna go like Hollywood stunt man, yeah, dared evils and like who would be crazy enough to strap themselves to a rocket? Yeah, And they found out pretty quickly it's no help to us if it's not an engineer or somebody out there. You can fix the rocket if something goes wrong with that. But just they can say, hey, this is what's happening and try and diagnose it in real time and have like a scientific method mind of for when you build the next one, I won't fall out if you do this, or maybe it's a thruster thing or blah blah blah. And so it's just interesting that, like it took a guy who has to know how to see a cause and effect to have been bitten by a tick and go wait a minut. That's the thing that was different. Yeah, and and like I don't know, just somebody who has the it bit the wrong person if it wanted to stay man. Yeah, someone who was equipped to be able to tell you what went wrong and here's how and diagnose what may have happened. Yeah, he still wasn't really able to stop it. Did he get the tick? I don't know if he got the tick, but he got the disease. It's like a spider man get bit and then if the spider died or it went away, you know what I mean, he doesn't have the spider anymore. I'm sure he doesn't because he got bit by the tick and then came down with the disease. But I'm sure by then the tick was long gone. Tick left. Yeah, because he wasn't. It's not like he was. He wasn't investigating ticks already. He just happened to, he put he was like, wait a second, this just happened. Wait, we should check to see what's going on with the ticks. And then that's yeah. I'm just saying that it would be. I'm sure when he told his friend about it, they're like, would you still have the tick? We can see if it's got all the task down, Yeah, and beat it out of it. With very small fists. Yeah. The last thing I want to flag about the Lone Star tick is where it's been showing up. We talked earlier about how it's been steadily spreading north out of Texas all the way up into Maine. Riding the rails. Yeah, hobo ticks, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure hobos have had some crazy ticks too. I don't even want to It's the only thing that kills the tick community is a bit a hobo, and then it brings that back to its community of like it's got rail riding disease. I don't know the standard explanation for how it's spreading so far and wide is climate change, and that is almost certainly, probably definitely most of the story. But the lone star tick really did seem to start showing up in the Northeast in a hurry. And one of the places it landed earliest and most aggressively, Actuary City. No, no, no, no, not a sanctuary for ticks happens to be right across the water from a US government bio weapons lab. So buckle up, baby, because it is time for Chris's Spiracy Corner. So the town of Old Lime, Connecticut, where the original lime disease cluster popped up in the nineteen seventies, sits on Long Island Sound. Well did you when you stayed with my family? I did, And I didn't even realize until fairly recently in my life that that's what the Long Island Sound was, because they didn't grow up anywhere near it. Sure, yeah, when you look out, that's not the Atlantic Ocean. Right, it's the Long Island Sound is the body of water between Connecticut and the north shore of Long Island, and about nine miles offshore from Old Lime, almost in a directly straight line. Across the water, is a small piece of land called Plum Island. Now Plumb Island has lots of conspiracy theories floating around it, some of which helped inspire stranger things, some of which I'm sure have helped inspire heinous acts individuals who believe that they are stopping a government conspiracy. But Plum Island in reality has been home since the nineteen fifties to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, which on paper is a USDA facility that researches foreign animal diseases like foot and mouth disease and African swine fever. Off paper, according to a lot of different investigative journalists, declassified documents, and the like, it has also been home to a story that the federal government would prefer you didn't poke too hard at. And that story, of course, starts with the Nazi. In two thousand and four, an attorney named Michael Christopher Carroll, not the Nazi, just to be clear, published a book called Lab two fifty seven, The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory German Laboratory. Germ Laboratory also may have had a German involved. This book was a big deal. It was a New York Times bestseller Today's Show Book Club pick. It spent years on the radar. Carol had spent the better part of a decade going through a bunch of declassified documents in the National Archives. And the picture that he assembled is one of those things that it's well researched and it kind of feels like history, but it also has got a touch conspiracy to it. Okay, according to Carol, and a and a CounterPunch piece by this guy, Carl Grossman that kind of summarizes Carol's findings. Here's basically what happened after World War two ended. As we've discussed before, up paper Clip. Operation paper Clip was a government classified intelligence program that brought valuable or scientists that they considered valuable from Nazi Germany to America. Not just America, I think a couple of the Allied nations. Well, and a lot of it was inspired by a race. They knew that if we didn't grab them, the Soviets were going to grab them. Even though the Soviets also hated the Nazis, they wanted to pull the as much of the brain power that worked against them. I just needed people. They lost like twenty five million people world War two They didn't even ask if you were a scientist. They were like, hey, the doors open, Yeah, my back is turned. You do what you want, you fly the Russian flag man, no questions asked. But anyway, Yes, there was a competition basically to get the best of the brightest from Nazi Germany, which is the horrible thing to say, but it did happen, and we brought hundreds of former Nazis into the country. Their backgrounds were laundered, they were given research positions inside the government and in the military. Werner von Braun is the most famous of these. Yeah, he's on TV with Walt Disney doing like teach kids about rockets and sciences. Yes, he ended up running the Apollo program. Yeah, for NASA, very well a Nazi. Well you're aware. I don't know if he's aware there's someone else listening to this conversation podcast. I never remember. He's also in the first season of For All Mankind, which is a little little guilty pleasure show. I like, yeah, but our subject is not Werner von Braun. Our subject. The relevant paper clip recruit for this story is a guy named Eric Traub. During the war, Troub had been the lab chief of a Nazi bio weapons facility called in cell Reams, which just sounds evil. Well, now, well that's taken on new meanings. It sat on a little crescent shaped island in the Baltic Sea, and he reported directly to Heinrich Himmler. His specialty was developing bioweapons that you could deploy against livestock. The theory the Nazis had was that they wanted to try to wipe out the Soviet unions cattle and reindeer herds and starve swaths of the country without actually having to go fight them. One of my favorite jokes in Mitchell and Webb in the sketch where they're like where they play Nazis and they're like. Are we the baddies? Are we the baddies because the designed the uniforms. But one of my favorite jokes in that is, like, there was anything I learned in the last thousand miles of retreat is that Russia's in dire need of mechanized farming. Like they burned everything, yeah, or whatever whatever the hell they had done, they destroyed all the crops. Well, Eric Traumb, who was studying how to wipe out these cattle and reindeer herds was specifically researching disease carrying insects with a a particular interest and text tics. Operation paper Clip brought Traub into the US in nineteen forty nine and set him up at Fort Dietrich and Maryland, which also has a whole host of occult spooky connections. Yeah, what do you think that conversation with him is? It was like, listen, how would you lights come to America's Like is this a trick? And it was like, no, your tick work speaks for you. Like who even knew, Hey, this is a guy other than I guess it would just be the Nazi high command where it would be like, well, if Hemmler or whatever his fucking dave is yea, if like Himmler trusted him, then he must be somebody. But if they gave him money or like and we knew von Brahm was making like the V two rocket or whatever, Yeah. I mean, I don't know at what point, I don't know. I just don't know what tick Head was like, we gotta snatch this dude. You can't let the Soviets get the tick guy. Well, I would imagine that some American scientists were probably been working on a similar thing at some point, like understood the power of ticks to potentially spread disease, you know, and misery, and you know, whether they were working on this exact project already and went get me that guy, or if just somebody had never had the evil plan to try it, or never had the the had had the plan but had not tried it, they will, well he'll do it, you know, like get him over here. He clearly doesn't have an issue with this anyway. Whyever, for whatever reason that they settled on this guy, they set him up in forty Trick At the time, that was the Army's primary biological warfare research site. Probably World War two, there was already like mustard gas is illegal and shit, right, like yeah, there were already like rules of engagement and like war stuff that chemical warfare was off the table. Yet every country here is actively pursuing it at the time, oh for sure. And to be to be totally honest, like I have no idea what was outlawed when And like you know, mustard gas is a bioweapon, but it's not germ warfare. And no, I don't know if germ warfare was also made Like I don't. Also, these motherfuckers didn't care and not you know, like they're just inventing things. I'm just saying that there was like it seemed like a bunch of people guys together after the first one. I was like, let's just agree to not do that again. Huh. Yeah. I was coming back like that's we can all agree that that sucked. Yea, And I think enough people were like, you're right, like Geneva convention type shit, They're yeah, you're right, we won't do that. A guy in a lab being like, what if I put this on a tick and then I put a tick in the cheese they eat, It's like, buddy, calm down right. Yeah, I guess you know, to TRB, starving millions of people didn't seem maybe as bad as mustard gas attacks. But yeah, see, at the end of the day, it's all pretty awful. The Germans did poison a bunch of food. I think though, like when they would leave an area or on retreat or what have you. I think they did like set up tables for the Soviet soldiers to find. That's like, oh, that looks like really good food and stuff. That's like because a lot of people in these towns or whatever were fucking starving anyway because of all the shit going on, and it would just like all the food be poisoned. That's that's I mean, when they're still finding booby traps right like in London and shit. Know what they say, don't put it past the Nazi. Don't put it past the Nazi, and. They certainly tried everything. I feel like it's the year twenty twenty four and I'm still reading at that time, like like two years ago. I feel like there's another like old woman opens cabinet to find like Nazi booby trapped bomb. I don't know about booby traps, but I know, I mean, they do still find unexploded bombs and stuff from World War Two all over the place. But in any case, Traub, who was brought initially to Fort Dietrich, became one of the central figures in the establishment of a similar facility on Plumb Island in the early nineteen fifties, and everybody knew it was up. There was an anonymous source who told Carol they called him the Nazi Scientist. So there are fucking people living in free houses at this point because they fought in the war. And across the sound there's a Nazi building a bug facility. But even working it was very fresh in the minds of people who had no help with PTSD, Like, I can't imagine even working in that facility that he There must have been some people who were fucking pissed he was there. I'm regardless of what he's doing there. Yeah, even if he's just collecting dad or whatever on dandelions, people would be like, what the fuck is this guy that, like all my buddies died fighting doing here? Yeah, so that's Troub. Troub was a Nazi who was brought over to be a bioweapons specialist with a specialty in tics, and he established Plumb Island in the nineteen fifties. What makes all this a little crazier is that this guy Carol wasn't the first person to write about any of this. In nineteen eighty two, which was like twenty something years before Carrol's book came out, an attorney named John Loftis published a book called The Belarus Secret. At the time, Loftis was working for the US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations, which was the official unit to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals who'd ended up living in America. So this guy wasn't like a lunatic connecting dots on a map. He was a literal Nazi hunter for the US government. In his nineteen eighty two book, Loftus wrote that he had received information, presumably through his work at the Department of Justice, that the US had tested poison tics on the Plumb Island artillery range in the early nineteen fifties. He also noted, almost in passing, that most of the records of that testing had been destroyed. I bet. So we have these two attorneys, basically separated by more than twenty years, coming from different angles, with different source materials, both reaching the same conclusion that Plumb Island had dangerous ticks, the ticks had pathogens, and some of them probably got out. Yeah. Well, yeah, we did our best to have it be an island. But yeah, what was the what was that book that we both liked by Tom whatever? About like the Oh Chaos by yeah, by Tom I forget his last name, Yeah, but Maut the Banson's. Yeah, the Manson like as being like an ass in a government asset. Basically, yeah, there's enough in that book too, where you're like, oh, shit, it's like doesn't feel as conspiracatorial when enough of the paperwork is declassified or there or so clearly these connections can be made. Yeah. And then also with that, I think there was a bunch of shit in that, and maybe in the Montauk Project whatever, hell we talked about mk Ultra and shit, yeah, where it's like, oh, they destroyed all the documents, but they didn't destroy the receipts for buying the stuff or whatever, so you're still able to connect that there was clearly Yeah, they. Were well an mk ult they literally just forgot to just somehow some of the boxes just did not get destroyed. So somebody, I don't he wasn't like literally cleaning out a closet, but they basically clean out of the clouset. Were like, what's this I'm saying so things like this too. Was like no, yeah, like it's in spiritorial. But they're also like, we have the receipts literally, yeah, that they were doing shit a plumb Island. They like, nobody needs to order that many ticks. Yeah, the world's number one Nazi tic doctor ordered a whole bunch of ticks. Yeah, and the thing is about like putting it on the artillery range or the hell you had said, is it trying to like see if if it bites. I don't know exactly what they were doing, because that's. Like the DuPont thing where they made like nonstick bullets. No, well so DuPont, who makes like paint vainly they do a million things. Yeah, they like nonstick pans we use. I think that was like originally on tanks to keep like water off the treads or so. It was some shit where like the way that like when you put something in there, like it beads and rolls around, it doesn't. So anyway, that Forever Chemical was originally had war applications, and they found out that you can make fucking eggs without having them stick. They put the material into cigarettes. They were like, this ship might be cancerous, you know, like we should check. So the way they'd checked was they put like a little bit of the material in cigarettes, then gave the cigarettes out for free at the factory floor. Oh my god, and then everybody who fucking. Worked there they like died of cancer. Well they were like what they get lung cancer? Like their hair fell like radium girls like it was not and then the same thing, they were like, just bury it to destroy the documents, but didn't destroy enough so when they were beingsued a bunch. I think there's a movie about it. It's really fucking sad. It's a narrative film, so I'm sure there's a lot of it's not a documentary, right, so I'm sure there's a lot of artistic license. But it's called dark Waters. I think Dark Water with uh Mark Ruffalo, and it's really an incredibly depressic movie about how like DuPont just paid people off. Well, dark Water is about a chemical company poisoning an entire town, but it's not through cigarettes. No, it's dust your runoff. Oh yeah, yeah yeah. But I believe it's either the actual story there's based on the actual story that I'm talking about, or it actually is they're talking about the actual story I'm talking about. But part of the court case as to you knew what you were doing was that they did this test with cigarettes. Oh I see, I see, and. Then still went on to make a billion dollars a year in pans, right, But like so they were like not only because they're like, we didn't even know that that could make your cow woll fucked up and it was like you did your own in house study. Yeah, but yeah, that was wild shit man. So now I want to bring back a name from earlier in the episode. I told you we would come back to Willie Bergdorfer. Bergdorfer, to recap, is the Swiss trained medical entomologist who in nineteen eighty one identified the bacterium that causes lime disease and got the bacterium named after him in nineteen eighty three. What I didn't get into is that Bergdorfer didn't arrive at that discovery from nowhere. For the previous several decades, he'd been working at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, doing classified research for the US Biological Weapons Program, and the specific research he was doing year in and year out for most of his career was injecting pathogens into ticks. His own paper, published in nineteen fifty two, describes the deliberate infection of ticks with diseases as part of his work. That is fucking crazy. Yeah, like that is it is a little knee or does he like put it in some some some like does he put he must put the disease in like a bunny and then put the ticks on the bunny to suck the blood. But either way, if you got a sick bunny that you filled with lime disease, that's one thing, Yeah, But to have to fill it into something that you can so easily lose, yeah, in a second, Like I looked one way, I looked back, that tick was gone. Right. There's not enough doors you can like close, in my opinion, to feel safe with doing that. No. And according to Chris Nuby, who is a Stanford science writer who's done some of the most rigorous modern reporting on all of this, Bergdorffer spent all these two decades inside the bioweapons program. Looking for the tickie loss. Yeah, down on his hands and he's going, oh god, oh god, o god, I's done. No he he uh. He grew microbes. This is this is actually how they did it. He grew microbes inside of ticks and then fed the tick. All no, wow, go ahead. He through the microbes inside the ticks, fed the ticks to lab animals, and then harvested the results to determine which combinations of tick and pathogen produced the kinds of illnesses. The military wanted to be able to deploy. Everyone involved in this should be in prison, and if I see one of them in heaven, I'll be pizzed. These are people who went and decided this is what I'm gonna do and took a harder path at it too. I really think just gotta be easier to put things in a bigger animal, right. You would imagine, But I guess he was trying to grow new kinds of diseases. So, but the idea that he's or anyone is gonna wake up in the morning and be like, gotta go disease a tick this morning, then I gotta not only like, let a tick be a tick, which is, hey, man, I can't help it if the tick wants to bite this rabbit, but no o, they're force feeding animals ticks. Hey eat this bug? Is crazy? Yeah, and then be like what happened to the rabbit? And it was like, oh, the rabbit's whole head exploded, and then the US government being like, no, the ideal thing for us is if their eyebrows fall off so that we embarrassed their army. Yes, too many questions will come from heads exploding. And so he was like, all right, gotta put a different fucking disease in this tick and see if the eyebrows fall off. Like the idea that someone's doing it is awful and he should be in hell. The idea that someone is looking over their work to be like, we actually have fucked up goals in mind for this also should be in hell. Yes, Nixon officially shut down the US offensive bioweapons program in nineteen sixty nine, but a number of the TICK. Programs at a public announcement or he did it. It's like quietly in the background the army stopped doing it. I don't know, but it was officially just. As a man who was I have a lot of controversy in his presidency. He did, and so. I imagine it could also be like, hey, bring our boys home, and he's like, I shut down a TICK thing today. Well, I'm the good guy. He shut it down. But it was already too late, because we. Know that most things TICK related. Late, and we know that at least two of the TICK programs had already left the lab on purpose in one form or another. After the Bay of Pigs, the United States dropped disease ticks on Cuba as part of Operation mongoose. This has been verified through multiple sources, including declassified JFK files and quotes from a CIA officer involved at the time. The goal of the drop was to make Cuban agricultural workers sick enough to disrupt the sugarcane harvest. And there was also a separate Army funded project around the same period, which is even crazier, in which researchers released hundreds of thousands of radioactive ticks along the Atlantic Bird Flyway near Norfolk, Virginia. They'd made them radioactive. So you can find them again. Yes, that's about to say, like, at least you can isolate an isotope. That's what my mind immediately went to that. Yes, it wasn't to create a bunch of radio or radiated super soldiers or formed from birds or whatever. They wanted to track them with Geiger counters once they spread. I feel like a genius for knowing that. The whole point of the experiment was to study how far ticks would migrate when they hitch rides on migratory birds. Yeah, just want to point out these birds were migrating north. A lot of these ticks over the years migrating pretty far north. I will say. I mean, the more you hear about this stuff us doing this show, or shows that do a lot more conspiracy heavy shit than we'll ever do, the more you must just be like everything's I wouldn't take the vaccine either, But you know what I mean, if like I had two hundred and sixty episodes of this type of shit, not on our show, but other types of shows, well, I'd also be like, I'm not putting anything in my body the government tells me to. Yeah, I mean, I think you can. There's a big difference between being able to draw connections between things and be able to prove something in a way that should affect the way that you live your life. And you know, I think it's really important to be able to look at things and go huh without going, well, fuck it, I'm not taking any vaccines. I'm not because you can make almost anything rhyme, like all these science instead of gone missing. There's some weird coincidences in there. There's some disappearances that seem a little odd, desks that seem spooky, but nothing that really is a defensible, provable pattern of operation of any kind, or at least not a pattern that I think you wouldn't find if you just surveyed. You know, let's say one hundred thousand scientists work for the government, Okay, thirty of them have had weird deaths and gone missing. If you just looked at one hundred thousand science teachers, you probably could find thirty who had weird desks or went missing or you know, went on a hike and died. And that doesn't mean that those science teachers were being killed as part of our government program. Okay, But anyway, the results. Looked in some way works for the fucking scientists. All That's the last. Thing I need is that people started saying that our show is like a psyop, like an anti to cover up the conspiracy. And yeah, that's what I'm saying, said said, like a guy who's been paid to cover up the conspiracies. The results go to an ad break. It was like, Hi, do you love science in the US government. The result of a lot of this is Chris Nuby, who we just mentioned, science writer at Stanford. She'd contracted lyme herself on Martha's Vineyard in two thousand and two. It took years and so many doctors to get the right diagnosis, and she got very deep into the chronic lime community. She produced a documentary in twenty fourteen called Under Our Skin about people suffering from chronic lime. So she spent from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen researching and writing a book called Bitten, The Secret History of Lime Disease and Biological Weapons, and it is a pretty well crafted piece of journalism. Now, Nuby has been in the presence of people with broader, weirder conspiracy theories, but the theories that she puts forward are you know, her name I think has been a little bit unfairly sullied because I think her theory of the case is less wild than what people have made it out to be on the internet. She does not claim that lime disease itself was created in the lab. We know that it was detected in Utsy. We know that these museum tic specimens have it like ninety million years ago. Okay, yeah, that's true. That's that's definitive. What she does argue is that a cluster little jetpacks was made ling Hitler Zoom through the Americans, guys, yeah, in their tick zeppelins. She argues that there's this cluster of three unusual tick born diseases that suddenly emerged around Long Island Sounds starting in nineteen sixty eight. So she doesn't think that those three ticks were represented in that painting of that dog's ear. No, although that would be an incredible that's like a Dan Brown level, like a er tick from the Hyena years exactly. No. She points out that within a fifty mile radius, all of a sudden, around nineteen sixty eight, you start having cases of limarthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted feed of her and babe ciosis. Can I throw something out here? Yes, when were we using agent orange in Vietnam? That would have been probably around the same time, is. What I'm thinking. Is it like, are people coming back and complaining about symptoms of that? So I think there was joint stuff related to that and all sorts of dizzyness and weird. Yeah. Is it like agent orange fucked people up? Yeah? So I'm saying, is it people which was also we did that because it war? Right? I don't know who that air quotes, it was definitely war. I'm saying like that was a a some sort of chemical warfare. So I'm saying, is there any overlap for does that come up at all in the book. No, not that specifically, but I'm sure you could find overlap between agent orange conspiracies and tick conspiracies. Her point is that the fact that all three of these sprung up within about a fifty mile radius around the same time, very near a facility that was publicly known to be experimenting with diseases on tics. Her quote is, I have no proof that line disease is a bioweapon, but I know they weaponized other tick born diseases. There were unsafe experiments with ticks and tickborn diseases, and that was fuel on the fire of this epidemic. Of course, I think we'll end this episode with everybody saying that I work for the CIA and I'm covering this up by pointing out the credential. Scientists push back hard on the lab leak theory of lyme disease. A twenty seventeen Stand for Genomics study found that Brellia burgdor Ferries DNA diversity is ancient, with lineages that diverged tens of thousands of years ago, distributed across the entire Northeast and Midwest in patterns that don't really fit a recent you know, point release like a source of a single lab. Okay, so if you if you found t rex lips in Amber, uh huh, and then you pulled from these two. First i'd asked why the t rex was kissing a tree famously not known to love trees. Yeah, but there was I think probably lonelyest epidemic then too. And so if you find these lips and then inside of them you found COVID, uh huh, there goes that lab league argument as well. Well, I think the difference is that you can cause an uptick in diseases. I think that's a little bit different because COVID is a more recent disease. Only because we haven't found in Ambry yet. Well, that's what I'm saying. But you can whether whether the disease has existed for millions of years or not. There is an argument to be made that if you all of a sudden start seeing a high percentage of cases around a lab known to be experimenting with that disease, it's not unreasonable to think that perhaps that disease has. Oh no, I didn't say it was unreasonable, and that is where I think it came from. Yeah, No, I mean, I'm just saying It's just it's the only other lab link outside of science fiction work I can think of. It's why I made that correlation, like you talking about this lab link is the only other lab liak I've ever heard of that wasn't like COVID. No, I meant that wasn't like there's the COVID lablink theory. Then the one you just told me right now, Yeah, is the first time I've ever thought of another lab leak that wasn't like the stand or something. Oh sure, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean. Or it's a work of fiction. Yeah, But anyway, The science pushback on this is there's lots of different, slightly different genetic lineages of lime disease that are all distributed all around the country and the planet in ways that don't line up with the idea that there was really a sudden spike that could be attributed to a particular lab. Yeah, but the one that when you zoom in or a microscope has a barcode for the United States Air Force or something there that might be the one we did in the lab. The scientific argument is that the explosion of American lime cases over the past forty years is much better explained by ecological factors like suburban sprawl pushing humans further into deer habitats, populations of deer and whitefooted mice that went through the roof decades of reforestation. All of these things create ideal conditions for tick populations to thrive and expand without any lab interference in the way that they found all these cases. I also think there's something to be said for the fact that, yes, we only discovered lime disease officially in the nineteen seventies. I this wasn't part of my research. I imagine it's probably kind of difficult to try to go back and figure out what rates of cases would have been before we officially discovered instide, we didn't have the data set. And it's and it's while it's a bad disease, the symptoms aren't. It's not like a Bola, where it's like, well, let's look for cases of people's vomiting blood back. It is a bola is bad back, big bad way. But you know, joint aches, nausea, like these are things that lots of other diseases cause a lot of overlap. Yeah, so if you tried to look back through the record and go, well, what was lyme and what was something else? You could never really say for sure. So all we know is that, yes, around late sixties, early seventies we started seeing these waves of cases. That's also around the time we defined what it was. So you know, I think it's I think the research here is I think similarly well documented in the way that chaos is where you go something something was going on. I mean, you you if there's any hint of truth, and it sounds like it's one hundred percent true that we had people saying good morning, al or whatever and walking into a facility where they put viruses and ticks and fed them to fucking animals with a with a goal to deploy these ticks on the battlefield. Yeah, that's all I need to hear. Yeahs In eds In not into doing it. I'm just saying that, like, yeah, I mean it could very well if some element of this shit, I could see how people can get wrapped up and like, yeah, no, this was not nature that did this. Yeah, well, look, guys, that was everything you ever need to know about ticks by Chris and ed our book report. We didn't even mention the superhero once. We didn't even mention that tick this. I fell asleep last night trying to remember that. I wanted to bring up tick the Superhero the cartoon show, the live action show, didn't even mention it on comic book. The comic book. But that's okay. I think we've talked enough about ticks. Speaking of comics. I was just thinking about comics because you were like, oh, this explosion came around the same that, all of a sudden, we were looking for it every couple years in the comic community. It's like, oh, this book was super rare. There's like four on the census, and it was like, you know, it's worth five hundred thousand dollars. And then word gets out that a new record sold for five hundred thousand dollars. All of a sudden, there's like thirteen more that show up in the fucking census. Everyone sees it's worth money. Oh I actually I do have one of those. My grandpa did have Superman three or whatever. I just chose to random ass it's worth anything I'm saying, but like, it's just one of those things where now everyone's looking it's popular. Turns out there are more first eppearance of fucking Superman's out there. Yeah. Yeah, and now you can find out there's money to be made in it. They're showing up. Yeah, and so same thing with you said, like now that everyone's looking, now that's top of mind. Oh my god, tick six ticks. So we segued right from Chris's conspiracy corner to Ed's comics corner, and now we will end this episode with the fear tier, Ed, where do you place ticks on your fear tier this summer? It's a six. I feel like I'm doing eight a lot, and it's a six. I don't know. We didn't look at the numbers for California tick wise. Mm hmm. I think we are in a pretty good situation. Bad air quality, wildfires once again happening, but not a lot of mosquitos, Like we rarely deal with mosquitos. Here, you got mosquito bites. But I'm saying, not a lot of mosquitoes, not a lot of ticks stuff, not a lot of crazy spiders. Yeah, but we we have forty different species of ticks in California, making it it's one of the most tick diverse states in the country. Giant piece of land, and the western black legged tick is the primary carrier of lime disease in California, found mostly in cool, moist, wooded areas. I'm not going there. I'm not going to end or and so I'm saying is like where we live in southern California. It's not I don't think I'll run into too many ticks here. Yeah, run into more tick cosplayers. I will put ticks at a four. I only went six this. Once they get you, you're going to be allergic or dead. So not necessarily, I don't want to over freak people out, but yeah, check for ticks. This make sure consider this our our PSA, our public service announcement. This is our At the end of our Gi Joe episode here, we're going to turn to the camera and say, hey, kids, check your legs for ticks when you come in from outside. Check your clothing, check your arms, check your scalp, check your butt. That's where I found mine. Make sure that you don't have any ticks digging in. They do spread disease. They are very dangerous, and we love you here. It's scared all the time. We don't want anybody getting sick from a tick. So we'll move to the city, become broke. But you're not gonna probably get bit by a tick. That's true as much once I left rural looking to my family lives by the water. Now we're saying once I left more rural inland Connecticut. Yeah, I don't really run into ticks that much. No, a lot of city people don't. And even if you're out in the country, you know to wear long pants, you know, to wear long socks, you check, you're gonna be fine. I think ticks are a solid for And with that, it's the end of the episode, guys. So until next time, I'm Chris Glari and I'm Ed and the show is Scared All the Time. We will see you soon. Bye bye. Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Klari and Edvacola. Written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola. Additional support and Keeper of Sanity is test Fightful. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual ste. And Mister Disclaimer is And just. A reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return, depending on the tear you choose. We'll be offering everything from ad free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for a Patreon and Scared All the Time podcast dot com. Don't worry, Full Steady Cat's welcome. No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without provision copyright Astonishing. Legends Production Night. We are in this together, together, Together,