Speaker 1: Astonishing Legends Network Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount
Speaker 1: of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect
Speaker 1: around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount,
Speaker 1: expect another call from me.
Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scaret all the time. I'm
Speaker 2: Chris Colari and I'm for Cola. And this is our
Speaker 2: second episode in our multi month Summer of Fear that
Speaker 2: runs June through August. We kicked it off with a
Speaker 2: look at Tsunamis in our last episode with the Ladies
Speaker 2: of Drinking the kool Aid, and this week we are
Speaker 2: getting up close and personal with a creature that might
Speaker 2: be one of God's biggest mistakes outside of the Ocean.
Speaker 2: Outside of the ocean, these are ticks. These biting, bloodsucking
Speaker 2: bastards can spread disease and misery further and faster than
Speaker 2: almost any other creature on Earth, with the exception of mosquitoes,
Speaker 2: which we'll be looking at next summer under a microscope.
Speaker 2: They look like monsters, and if you're unlucky enough to
Speaker 2: get one burrowing under your skin this summer, you might
Speaker 2: just find out how dangerous they can really be. From
Speaker 2: lime disease to meet allergies to finding themselves at the
Speaker 2: center of one of the most popular conspiracies of the
Speaker 2: last I don't know fifty years. Ticks tick every box
Speaker 2: on the summer of fear or on the fear tier, okay,
Speaker 2: both both. They tick all the boxes, everywhere, all the time,
Speaker 2: and then some. So put on your long pants, don't
Speaker 2: forget your high socks, and join us for a sunny
Speaker 2: walk through the fields of fear. But please stay away
Speaker 2: from the long grass. We would really love it if
Speaker 2: you survive the summer.
Speaker 3: What are we screw? When are we all the time? Now?
Speaker 2: Which is time for time?
Speaker 3: So ed?
Speaker 2: Yeah, chew that gummy bear, brother.
Speaker 3: It's not it's mots fruit snack. If they want to sponsor.
Speaker 2: Us, we're open for business. If you want to throw
Speaker 2: an ad on an episode of about blood sucking iraknids.
Speaker 3: It should be gushers.
Speaker 2: It should be cushers. Yeah, ticks have our attention this summer.
Speaker 2: They do every year. There's always at least one news
Speaker 2: cycle with headlines that are like tick season is here
Speaker 2: and it's worse than ever, or lime disease infections are up,
Speaker 2: Hikers dropping dead of tickborn illnesses.
Speaker 3: Ticks will get on you man. I was visiting a farm,
Speaker 3: a tree farm, doing research on projects I'm working on
Speaker 3: this past I don't know. It wasn't the summer, it
Speaker 3: was later than the summer. But they told me they
Speaker 3: also have like a dog, like a farm dog that
Speaker 3: fuck every day they're covered in ticks. Yeah, when they
Speaker 3: get home, like every day of working in the farm. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then they said they also have to go through
Speaker 3: the dog. Who's a delightful little dog. Yeah, well not little,
Speaker 3: but there's a delightful dog, and they would like have
Speaker 3: to go through the whole dog too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Where is this tree farm?
Speaker 3: Connecticut? Ah?
Speaker 2: We talk a lot about Connecticut.
Speaker 3: And I bet not an eystlime or anything, but it
Speaker 3: is Connecticut. I don't know why I brought that up
Speaker 3: so fast, but I just thought about it.
Speaker 2: It was the first thing on your mind. I said, ticks,
Speaker 2: And you thought about the ticks eating this poor dog.
Speaker 3: Well, I just thought about There are jobs where you're like,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna run into ticks for sure every single fucking day. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, we don't have those kinds of jobs. Podcasting
Speaker 2: is not one of those jobs. Even though I.
Speaker 3: When we lose our houses then it will be out
Speaker 3: in the field doing it for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even though I've lived in LA for almost twenty
Speaker 2: years at this point, a place where ticks are not
Speaker 2: the worst kind of bloodsucker you run across, I still
Speaker 2: get grossed out at the thought of them. Growing up
Speaker 2: in the woods on the East Coast installed ticks, I think,
Speaker 2: is just a permanent fixture of my sonxiety programming. If
Speaker 2: they aren't part of yours, they probably should be. They
Speaker 2: are nasty little fuckers, crawling on our skin, getting under
Speaker 2: our clothes, feeding off of us, and transmitting all kinds
Speaker 2: of horrific blood board diseases. As one article I found
Speaker 2: put it, quote, more than grizzly bears or mountain lions,
Speaker 2: the ticks of spring threaten human incursions into the wild
Speaker 2: and mark our sense of the living world as a
Speaker 2: place that is not so friendly to us. After all.
Speaker 2: I also learned that ticks aren't just a summer problem
Speaker 2: I always thought they were. Ticks can be active on
Speaker 2: winter days when ground temperatures are as low as forty
Speaker 2: five degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3: What are they doing out there?
Speaker 2: Looking for food, looking to eat?
Speaker 3: Do they only eat blood?
Speaker 2: They only eat blood?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Well, that I knew about ticks. The fact that they
Speaker 2: were active during the winter is one of the many
Speaker 2: things I learned in this was going to be very
Speaker 2: long episode about ticks. Jesus Man, I had no idea
Speaker 2: how ancient they actually are.
Speaker 3: I mean, I just said, Jesus Man, if they're ancient enough,
Speaker 3: he might have been like kidney with these ticks, because
Speaker 3: they walked everywhere, those guys him and those apostles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and in the in the this that's.
Speaker 3: Why they're watching each other's feet. Yeah, they're like fucking covering.
Speaker 2: Your coverings are everywhere. I had no idea how ancient
Speaker 2: they are. I had no idea what they're actually doing
Speaker 2: to your skin when they bite you.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: I definitely had no idea that they're making thousands of
Speaker 2: Americans allergic to hamburgers.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry what?
Speaker 2: And I sort of maybe the little inkling of an
Speaker 2: idea how they were related to the Nazi scientists on
Speaker 2: a secret government island off the coast of Connecticut. But
Speaker 2: before we get into all that, Ed, what is your
Speaker 2: history with tics?
Speaker 3: I started it early that I've went to a farm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I heard. We covered the farm, the trees,
Speaker 2: the dog combed, the dog the ticks. But as a
Speaker 2: kid in Connecticut, every.
Speaker 3: That was a check for tics when you get home
Speaker 3: from this is you have to understand back when we
Speaker 3: went outside to play and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kids, these days, you know you're not going to
Speaker 2: get a tick.
Speaker 3: You're not getting unless you're playing marathon where ticks is
Speaker 3: the name of a thing that chases you. Andy, we
Speaker 3: keep calling them spiders, but apparently they're ticks. Yeah, it
Speaker 3: was like check for tics, check for tics, check for tics.
Speaker 3: That's like I heard that. Every day you get home
Speaker 3: two things, you know, wash your hands you've been in public,
Speaker 3: and check for ticks.
Speaker 2: Did you ever find one?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah? My mom would use like like burnt matchheads
Speaker 3: to like get them out and then like and you
Speaker 3: can't like crush them and stuff, so you got to
Speaker 3: like put them in tape.
Speaker 2: Tape is one way burnt matchheads. We get into this
Speaker 2: a little bit.
Speaker 3: She might have just been burner for no reason.
Speaker 2: She might have been I think she was. I think
Speaker 2: Miss Vee was burning you for fun.
Speaker 3: I will say every time I say anything, she hit
Speaker 3: She listens to every episode. Then she's like, what sends
Speaker 3: me a holy email? Like it wasn't really We're remembering.
Speaker 2: We're not we're not, We're not putting dirt on your name.
Speaker 2: But I did find that the match heads, the burning
Speaker 2: them off is really not a recommended way to get
Speaker 2: them off and apparently pretty uneffective. Ineffective. Now I only
Speaker 2: had one tick. Well, I found a lot of ticks
Speaker 2: growing up. I had one guy.
Speaker 3: As harry as you You never saw ticks. No, I
Speaker 3: kind of hidden there because you gotta feel around.
Speaker 2: I found them, but I only ever had one that
Speaker 2: really dug in.
Speaker 3: It was like a problem, Oh, like you try and
Speaker 3: get out with sweezers and his head stays in.
Speaker 2: Did you have one of those ever?
Speaker 3: I think it came up. I don't know if that happened,
Speaker 3: but I'm saying I think there was a lot of
Speaker 3: protocol about, like, right, make sure the head doesn't stay in.
Speaker 3: I remember that much.
Speaker 2: I remember this one because A as far as I remember,
Speaker 2: it's the only tick that ever really dug in on me.
Speaker 3: And B.
Speaker 2: I was in like fifth or sixth grade. I came
Speaker 2: back from a hike at my grandparents in Massachusetts, and
Speaker 2: when I got undressed to take a shower, I found
Speaker 2: it on my butt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they go to butt's balls. They go to spots.
Speaker 2: I remember having my shorts like my butt exposed to
Speaker 2: my grandmother as.
Speaker 3: For a long year age.
Speaker 2: I was like, this was like fifth or sixth grade,
Speaker 2: like the age where you don't want to be showing
Speaker 2: your ass your grandmother at all. And there was much
Speaker 2: discussion and to do of how are we getting this
Speaker 2: thing out? Are we going to use tweezers or we've
Speaker 2: done grandma, Yeah, we're got to burn it off. And
Speaker 2: I don't remember how they eventually did get I think
Speaker 2: it was tweezers that she managed to like pinch the
Speaker 2: head and make sure it came fully out. But and
Speaker 2: I never got sick and every went to the hospital.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the most horrific experience. And to be honest,
Speaker 2: I think that being the worst tick ex I ever
Speaker 2: had kind of set me up to grow up thinking
Speaker 2: that ticks weren't really that big of a deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but there was a boogeyman element to them that
Speaker 3: they had to have been a big deal, Like there
Speaker 3: was so much to do about checking for ticks when
Speaker 3: you get home our whole lives, that it wouldn't be
Speaker 3: for just because we don't like the way they look.
Speaker 2: No, and we have one.
Speaker 3: We have one family friend, Yeah, who's got line disease.
Speaker 3: And for I don't know if it was from a tick,
Speaker 3: it must be probably, I don't know, but it is
Speaker 3: a truly debilitating disease. And so if I see a tick,
Speaker 3: I'm a punch in his face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're gonna spend the rest of this episode talking
Speaker 2: about all the reasons I grew up not being afraid
Speaker 2: enough of ticks, because not everyone is as lucky as
Speaker 2: I was. And to understand how a bug the size
Speaker 2: of a pencil tip. If you live somewhere where you've
Speaker 2: never seen a tick, these things are fucking tiny. That's
Speaker 2: part of why people have to check so carefully because
Speaker 2: they are easy to miss, especially if you have hairy
Speaker 2: legs like I do, or you know, even if you
Speaker 2: like freckles, a lot of freckles, they'll blend right the
Speaker 2: fucking Yeah.
Speaker 3: Brad Paisley, the country artist, has a song that's I
Speaker 3: might even be called Ticks. The kind of gross but
Speaker 3: funny premise of the song is he like kind of
Speaker 3: wants to like be with a lady, and it was like, hey,
Speaker 3: we can take Tar's clothes off and check each other
Speaker 3: for ticks is essentially the like premise is like, hey,
Speaker 3: that's something we all have to do around here, check
Speaker 3: for ticks. Yeah, how fun could it be with each other?
Speaker 2: Country music stays winning.
Speaker 3: It's Yeah, I'm Brad Paisley's the best. I love Brad Paisley.
Speaker 3: But it's a silly, silly song. But I hadn't thought
Speaker 3: about it in a minute. Yeah, it's gross, but it's.
Speaker 2: A pretty fun. It's a good, good concept for a song.
Speaker 2: But to understand we first we first have to understand
Speaker 2: what a tick is to understand why they're so dangerous.
Speaker 2: So I think people know the basics. They are tiny
Speaker 2: little parasites. They feed on the blood of mammals, birds,
Speaker 2: reptiles and amphibians and all reptiles. Yeah, reptiles, Oh.
Speaker 3: My god, just a lizard with a tick on it,
Speaker 3: and what is happening?
Speaker 2: They are not insects, they are araknids.
Speaker 3: So the spider family.
Speaker 2: They're the spider family, the scorpion family. All that really
Speaker 2: means is that they have four pairs of legs as
Speaker 2: adults and no antenna. But I think being sucked on
Speaker 2: by a spider parasite is just definitively worse.
Speaker 3: Than they suck on other rachnids. That's a good question,
Speaker 3: like cannibalistic.
Speaker 2: They I don't think they feed on each other. They
Speaker 2: might feed on a spider. I don't know spiders. How
Speaker 2: much blood does a spider have? I don't think I.
Speaker 3: Can imagine there's a lot of blood, don't don't. I
Speaker 3: can't imagine a scorpion being like, what's that? What are
Speaker 3: you doing, Bud? Like, what's that conversation? A scorpion? But
Speaker 3: get away from me?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't think they have any blood.
Speaker 2: Feed on any other insects. It's really just creatures with
Speaker 2: a lot of flowing blood. While all ticks are araknids,
Speaker 2: there are two main families of ticks. There are hard ticks.
Speaker 3: Those are the ones we can't we can't kill, put
Speaker 3: them in tape.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah. The EXO, the EXO skeletons, the IXO
Speaker 2: to die family, EXO to die.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to be better about mispronounciation. One so I've
Speaker 2: been looking up how to pronounce a lot of I'll
Speaker 2: tell you this. It's spelled I x O D I
Speaker 2: D A E x so did die?
Speaker 3: All right? Well, they're the cod tics.
Speaker 2: Hard ticks. They're the kind you see in your mind's
Speaker 2: eye when you If you've ever seen a tick, it's
Speaker 2: probably one of these. They look like a very very tiny,
Speaker 2: nearly flat crab basically, yeah, with a hard little plate
Speaker 2: on their back. Deer ticks that give you lime. The
Speaker 2: lone Star tick that we'll talk about later, the American dog.
Speaker 3: Ticks, lone Star tick in Texas.
Speaker 2: You'd think you'd think, Okay, all hard ticks. We're gonna
Speaker 2: talk a lot about hard ticks on this show.
Speaker 3: Should go well for the automatic transcription.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there are soft ticks.
Speaker 3: The family are We're going to get some interesting ad options.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, blue chees like guys. You can't help but
Speaker 2: notice you've been talking a lot about soft dicks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hard dicks. Both of those are our business. And
Speaker 3: one of your host is literally named Ed. Yeah, call
Speaker 3: us up.
Speaker 2: The business opportunities here. Ed. It's a it's a rich area.
Speaker 2: It's a rich it's a rich area. So the soft
Speaker 2: ticks are Gossidaye family are crazy looking. I don't think
Speaker 2: I've ever seen a soft tick before.
Speaker 3: I would love if you not turn your computer around.
Speaker 3: I never want to see a soft tick.
Speaker 2: Some people describe them as flattened raisins, flaccid raisins, flattened raisins,
Speaker 2: raisins already a flattened grape. Well, it's the hydrated grape,
Speaker 2: it is. But these are even flatter than raisins. They
Speaker 2: mostly live in caves and bird nests and animal burrows,
Speaker 2: and feed in quick spurts rather than the multi day
Speaker 2: siege that a hard tick would prefer. Soft ticks are
Speaker 2: generally not a problem for humans, I guess, unless maybe
Speaker 2: someone replaces all your raisins with them, in which case, who.
Speaker 3: Shrunk my raisins? Yeah, we spend as much time in
Speaker 3: caves or bird nests.
Speaker 2: No, All hard ticks and most of the soft ones
Speaker 2: share the same basic life cycle from egg to larvae
Speaker 2: to nymph to adult. Now, this is one of the
Speaker 2: first big things that I learned. Each stage of that
Speaker 2: life cycle, the tick requires a single blood meal in
Speaker 2: order to molt and move to the next se I
Speaker 2: need to feed four times. Basically, they feed three or
Speaker 2: four times over the course of their whole lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so triple unlucky if you're getting eaten, What do
Speaker 3: you mean, like it's I guess there's probably a lot
Speaker 3: of ticks, but I was just gonna say that, like,
Speaker 3: you know, they only need to eat four times, like
Speaker 3: you're one of their four meals. Like that's unlucky for
Speaker 3: you that you happen to be caught in that weird
Speaker 3: moment when they need to eat.
Speaker 2: Like, well, yeah, you're right, there are there's I don't
Speaker 2: I didn't look up how much I'm asquilo. I didn't
Speaker 2: look up how many ticks exist on planet Earth. But
Speaker 2: it's not surprising that you might have more than one
Speaker 2: feed on you. But it is a it is a
Speaker 2: meaningful parasitic relationship in the sense that you are directly
Speaker 2: helping this thing. Oh, I guess you could look at
Speaker 2: it that way and turn you're dying.
Speaker 3: It's taking away everything that makes you.
Speaker 2: It's drinking grow literal juice of your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: According to CDC, some tick species, like the brown dog tick,
Speaker 2: which may have been feeding on your four legged friend
Speaker 2: that you were talking about, prefer to feed on the
Speaker 2: same host during all life stages. So these dog ticks
Speaker 2: are lazy, disgusting little freaks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or they're not lazy, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: If if they prefer it and they commit to It're
Speaker 3: they're asking for a change of address and information and stuff.
Speaker 2: Like, well they're committing.
Speaker 3: There might be like a Homeward Bound style Pixar movie
Speaker 3: about it trying to.
Speaker 2: Like Kick who gets separated from his dog?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like it's slinky dog, Yeah from Toys Story.
Speaker 2: All the other ticks or lots of other ticks need
Speaker 2: to feed on a different animal for each of these
Speaker 2: blood meals that they have to do. So a baby
Speaker 2: tick hatches from an egg. It finds a small host
Speaker 2: like a mouse or a bird, latches on, drinks its
Speaker 2: multi day blood meal, drops off molts into a nymph.
Speaker 2: A nymph finds a slightly bigger host, latches on, takes
Speaker 2: a multi day blood meal, drops off molts into an
Speaker 2: adult and then adult ticks find the biggest hosts, and
Speaker 2: in the woods of the eastern United States, the biggest
Speaker 2: host is either a deer or you and the female.
Speaker 2: It's mostly the females that feed on blood. It seems
Speaker 2: like the males.
Speaker 3: I don't know why. I just in my mind there
Speaker 3: was no sexiest to these things.
Speaker 2: They were really when you see it, I can't imagine
Speaker 2: the trouble. It would be too sex a tick. Yeah,
Speaker 2: to figure out what we're looking at. It's hard enough.
Speaker 2: On dart frogs a tick, you definitely need a microscope.
Speaker 2: But the female takes one final massive blood meal before
Speaker 2: laying somewhere between two thousand and eighteen thousand eggs.
Speaker 3: All right, so it's not that rare, and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of ticks out there, there's a lot of Each
Speaker 3: one of these is dropping eighteen thousand fucking babies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of them don't survive because, yeah, because they
Speaker 2: need to find all these different creatures to feed on,
Speaker 2: and that's a difficult thing for them. The only saving
Speaker 2: grace here, I think is that, unlike vampires, all this
Speaker 2: blood drinking doesn't really do anything to extend the ticks
Speaker 2: life span very far. They die young. Most ticks don't
Speaker 2: live any longer than three years. So although I wonder
Speaker 2: if they did live longer than three years, if they
Speaker 2: just have to keep finding bigger and bigger animals until
Speaker 2: they become the size of a rabbit hanging off of
Speaker 2: an elephant or something.
Speaker 3: Disgusting. I hate what I'm hearing. How do you think
Speaker 3: they found out the three year like? It was like
Speaker 3: a documentary crew followed one tick from Larva.
Speaker 2: To There are people who study parasitic animals. We'll get
Speaker 2: into well, we're not going to touch on it too much,
Speaker 2: but there are scientists who study these things and who
Speaker 2: you know, really ticks get a lot of attention because
Speaker 2: they spread disease so far and so quickly that they've
Speaker 2: been studied intensely to figure out how do we stop this?
Speaker 2: You know, what can we do to make sure people
Speaker 2: don't catch these diseases? How long do they live? For
Speaker 2: people who are invested in making sure that humans don't
Speaker 2: get tickborn diseases, the lifespan being three years or five years,
Speaker 2: or ten years or twenty years, that makes a huge
Speaker 2: difference in how you're, you know, going about treating these things.
Speaker 2: So they've they've been studied quite a bit. But for
Speaker 2: those three years, ticks are on the war path and
Speaker 2: out for blood. They can't fly or jump, thank god, truly,
Speaker 2: although I remember, I don't remember who told me this
Speaker 2: or when, but there was a point when I was
Speaker 2: a kid that I was told that they fall on
Speaker 2: you from trees.
Speaker 3: They could. I don't know why. They doesn't require the
Speaker 3: ability to fly, just a fall.
Speaker 2: It is just a fall, but they don't do. I
Speaker 2: think I think that sort of urban myth about ticks
Speaker 2: got started because they are often found feeding on human scalps.
Speaker 3: But I think they just crawl up there.
Speaker 2: They do just crawl up there. That's the really gross
Speaker 2: thing about it, finding a tick on your scalp.
Speaker 3: They're cruising around. They start at the feet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the knowledge of knowing, oh, this tick's been on me.
Speaker 3: For a while. What and they're smart enough to know,
Speaker 3: go scalp, go somewhere you're hiding. They can they have
Speaker 3: not traditional smart maybe yeah what.
Speaker 2: I they're not doing advanced physics. Yeah, they do have
Speaker 2: a lot of organs that can sense the things warmth,
Speaker 2: I think carbon dioxide. Like, they have the ability to
Speaker 2: sense where they should be rooting around to get their
Speaker 2: next meal.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: They hunt by performing a move called questing, which is
Speaker 2: a pretty impressive feed of strength.
Speaker 3: But also in the video game parlance of it all
Speaker 3: is how they live their life. Yes, unless you're the
Speaker 3: brown tick dog or whatever you're like, and now I
Speaker 3: need to find another creature. And it was like each
Speaker 3: one in the reward at the end of this quest
Speaker 3: is like molt.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is a leveling up system. Of you know,
Speaker 2: you gotta go grind, you gotta get your XP and
Speaker 2: you got to become the next thing. They perform this
Speaker 2: move called quest, which is a pretty impressive feet of
Speaker 2: strength for something their size. So they climb up under
Speaker 2: the tip of a blade of grass or a leaf
Speaker 2: or a low hanging branch or something. They hold on
Speaker 2: to that leaf with their back legs and then they
Speaker 2: stick their front legs straight out in the air in
Speaker 2: sort of this like spread eagle Jesus on the cross posey.
Speaker 2: And if you're watching the video, see this is why
Speaker 2: you guys, you got to sign up for the YouTube channel.
Speaker 2: You gotta see.
Speaker 3: I don't know a frame, but.
Speaker 2: I'll go this way, I'll go this way. But they
Speaker 2: stick out like this spread eagle Jesus on the cross posts,
Speaker 2: and the front legs have organs called Holler's organs or
Speaker 2: Howler's organs that can sense carbon dioxide, body heat, and vibration,
Speaker 2: so they're almost like their legs become almost little antennas,
Speaker 2: and they just dangle them out there in the air.
Speaker 2: They just stand there waiting for warm blooded life to pass,
Speaker 2: and then when it does, they grab on climb aboard.
Speaker 3: When do they come down from the grass. At what
Speaker 3: point are they like, I've been waving my arms for days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I assume it's like a nine to five.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They then they'd clock in, They go down the grass,
Speaker 3: and then they get in a fight with their dick
Speaker 3: siblings to tick spouse, and then they get back up
Speaker 3: there the next day. Because there's a lot of places
Speaker 3: where nothing ever walks by. Probably probably yeah, And you know,
Speaker 3: to go to the other side of the yard might
Speaker 3: be a seven year journey for a little tick. Yeah.
Speaker 2: According to the CDC, some ticks will attach quickly and
Speaker 2: others will wander looking for places like the ear or
Speaker 2: other areas where the skin is thinner. Oh yeah, they'll
Speaker 2: get in there. They'll get right in that ear feeling.
Speaker 3: Believe that I've had ears as long as I have
Speaker 3: and have not you know, knock on Wood really had
Speaker 3: as far as I know stuff living in there. I've
Speaker 3: seen enough like episodes of of Er or like stuff
Speaker 3: where it's like, oh, I've got like an itching noise
Speaker 3: in my ear and then they pull it out. It's
Speaker 3: like ooz a full of cockroach. It died four days ago. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm just surprised that all our holes aren't filled at
Speaker 3: all times. That is what I'm saying, considering everything so small,
Speaker 3: they could be. So they say you swallow like eight
Speaker 3: spiders a year or something. Yeah, I don't remember how
Speaker 3: that landed in Our Spider's episode of that was true
Speaker 3: or not, but I don't either. We did look it up,
Speaker 3: but I don't remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, no, our holes could be filled with hard ticks.
Speaker 2: Soft ticks, yeah, I think.
Speaker 3: Hard probably a better chance.
Speaker 2: Once the tick finds a seat at the table, that
Speaker 2: is when the really nasty shit starts, because unlike a
Speaker 2: mosquito that basically just stabs you, drinks for a second
Speaker 2: and flies off, a tick is basically doing surgery on
Speaker 2: you and then moving. In per an article I found
Speaker 2: on PubMed Central, the tick has three main mouth parts.
Speaker 2: The two outer pieces called palps, helps sense where to
Speaker 2: dig in. The two middle blades are called shelissira, which
Speaker 2: the tick uses to literally slice open your skin like
Speaker 2: a little scalpel okay. And then in the center of
Speaker 2: those three pieces is the real like hr Geiger night
Speaker 2: mare piece, the hypostome, which is a barbed needle like
Speaker 2: spike covered in rows of backwards facing teeth, so.
Speaker 3: It's the little mouth that comes out in alien.
Speaker 2: Yes, basically, except this little mouth instead of shoving a
Speaker 2: stomach or a face hugger down your throat or I
Speaker 2: don't think it does that, just.
Speaker 3: A little mouth and alien. It's just like a weird
Speaker 3: small that comes out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I always, I guess I always assume that the
Speaker 2: purpose of that was to shove the egg down your throat.
Speaker 3: No, because the egg is a completely separate thing that
Speaker 3: face huggers come out of.
Speaker 2: That's a good point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the face hugger is the delivery method. Then you
Speaker 3: are the host. You burst out, and the last life
Speaker 3: cycle of the thing that grew in you is an
Speaker 3: alien that has a smaller alien on a rail in.
Speaker 2: Its mouth, which they made for great toys.
Speaker 3: Though they made for good toys.
Speaker 2: So yes, this the hypostome is sort of like the
Speaker 2: thing that comes out of the alien's mouth and alien,
Speaker 2: except it is barbed and covered in needles and covered
Speaker 2: in backwards facing teeth.
Speaker 3: I imagine's barbed so it doesn't like fly off you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it drives it in and then you can't pull
Speaker 2: us fish hook. Now, those three mouthparts are just to
Speaker 2: make sure it's attached long enough to do the really
Speaker 2: hard work of actually cementing itself to your body. I
Speaker 2: had no idea they did.
Speaker 3: So the barbs is not cement.
Speaker 2: The barbs is not cement. It's not just the cut
Speaker 2: and the spike. Ticks are also part construction worker, and
Speaker 2: they use what it's called literally tick cement to make
Speaker 2: sure that they stay attached to you.
Speaker 3: So they secrete something.
Speaker 2: Yes, the University of Rhode Island runs a public health
Speaker 2: project called tick Encounter, and they have a write up
Speaker 2: on how this works. It is colorfully titled when I
Speaker 2: pulled this tick off, my skin came with it, and
Speaker 2: it is probably the most informational piece of body horror
Speaker 2: I've ever read. So quote, ticks could begin secreting cement
Speaker 2: within five to thirty minutes of attachment, and that concrete
Speaker 2: comes in what the article calls flavors. There's cone cement,
Speaker 2: which is deposited first and hardens rapidly, and then after
Speaker 2: about a day, the tick begins secreting cortical cement, which
Speaker 2: hardens more slowly. The pattern of cement deposits varies among
Speaker 2: types of ticks, and the degree to which the cement
Speaker 2: infiltrates the host epidermis and dermis or. Your skin also
Speaker 2: differs by species, and this species specific pattern of cement
Speaker 2: deposition also probably helps determine just how much of you
Speaker 2: comes off along with the tick, even when removed correctly.
Speaker 3: With tweezers, yeah, because you don't realize that you're all
Speaker 3: so it's not. It's probably just taking the smallest amount
Speaker 3: of top layer skin off and not that we wouldn't
Speaker 3: even notice.
Speaker 2: Potentially, this article made it sound like skin comes off,
Speaker 2: but you know that may depend on again the size
Speaker 2: of tick, how much cement it secretes.
Speaker 3: I mean, I can't imagine you're pulling it off and
Speaker 3: then just like a fruit by the foot ribbon of
Speaker 3: skins all the way down your arm.
Speaker 2: No, it doesn't. I don't think the tick attaches itself
Speaker 2: so much that you can peel your skin off.
Speaker 3: Banana, that's the way this articles making it sound. But
Speaker 3: banana might be one of those cement flavors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't mention which flavor tastes better, but it
Speaker 2: does sound like it can be very painful sometimes to
Speaker 2: remove the full tick. Some ticks, like the lazy American
Speaker 2: dog ticks we mentioned earlier quote secrete additional deposits of
Speaker 2: cement in various dimensions onto the skin's surface, forming flat
Speaker 2: lateral flangies that aggregate on the skin and help secure
Speaker 2: the attachment of the ticks with shorter mouth parts to
Speaker 2: their hosts. But it also means that more skin is
Speaker 2: likely to be sacrificed when removing those kinds of ticks.
Speaker 3: I don't like fuck these ticks, man, Yeah, but I
Speaker 3: like downlike their whole The whole thing sucks.
Speaker 2: While it's glued. They do suck. Hey, Okay, while this
Speaker 2: thing is glued to you, it's pumping basically a chemical
Speaker 2: cocktail that you would like find in a hospital into
Speaker 2: your bloodstream. There's anesthetics so you don't feel the bite.
Speaker 3: Okay, just like leeches. Leeches do something similar.
Speaker 2: I feel like, Yes, there's anticoagulants I was thinking of
Speaker 2: keep the blood flowing. Yeah, and immunosuppressants so that your
Speaker 2: body doesn't notice that it's there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's also not like, hey, a foreign infection. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we should send something from osmosis jones down there.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They just hang out and your body is none
Speaker 2: the wise.
Speaker 3: This is ridiculous. This is like if a cat burglar
Speaker 3: had the ability to cut the window. You know in
Speaker 3: their body and then also not be seen by any
Speaker 3: security cameras once it's in the jewelry place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
Speaker 3: That's crazy. That would be the most dangerous burglar in
Speaker 3: the world. They would never get caught.
Speaker 2: Well, the difference is the burglar needs to get in
Speaker 2: and out. That's the whole point. The tick wants to
Speaker 2: stay attached to you for as long as possible.
Speaker 3: Is that shanging say in the movie it was perfectly fine, roofman.
Speaker 3: This is a roofman tick. It inst for a while.
Speaker 3: It's true the criminal that moves in.
Speaker 2: Because unlike mosquitos, the point of doing all of this is, well,
Speaker 2: like mosquitos, they want to get to your blood, but
Speaker 2: unlike mosquitos, they're not tapping a vein and just drinking.
Speaker 2: They want to hang out. So these ticks use their
Speaker 2: shellisea ray, those little scalpels that they have on their
Speaker 2: mouth to cut your blood vessels open, and then they
Speaker 2: sit there with their face basically in a pool of
Speaker 2: blood that wells up from under your skin. Okay, biologists
Speaker 2: call them pool feeders because a tick doesn't really drink
Speaker 2: your blood so much as it bathes in it. No,
Speaker 2: depending on the species, ticks will suck this blood anywhere
Speaker 2: from minutes to days, which.
Speaker 3: Is well, I need to know about the minutes, what
Speaker 3: blood type there's gop no, thank you? You know what
Speaker 3: I mean? Like every other tick's there. For a while,
Speaker 3: I was like, what the hell was wrong with that guy?
Speaker 3: I got in a pool of this disgusting blood and
Speaker 3: I got out of there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I would imagine the ticks that are picky enough that
Speaker 2: they're out of there after a few minutes probably don't
Speaker 2: live very long.
Speaker 3: I mean, or they're alone like us, well, like me.
Speaker 2: There might there might be. There's probably some more research
Speaker 2: about because a lot of the research I read definitely
Speaker 2: makes it sound like ticks are there for the long haul.
Speaker 2: So this particular biology saying minutes to days, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe he means hundreds of thousands of minutes, or maybe
Speaker 2: there's just some rare species of tick.
Speaker 3: Or some species it gets on only lives minutes.
Speaker 2: Possibly possibly, I don't know what the point of that
Speaker 2: would be.
Speaker 3: They don't know, they knew, we know nothing about most
Speaker 3: of these I'm saying, like they don't know, like ticks
Speaker 3: don't know they don't know what they're getting on.
Speaker 2: That's that's true. They don't know the difference between.
Speaker 3: They might get on a fucking dog that's sick, a
Speaker 3: deer that was like just came into the woods to
Speaker 3: die alone. Yeah, and then it's like I got one
Speaker 3: and then it was like this blood turned real coal
Speaker 3: all of a sudden. Oh no, I think it's dead.
Speaker 3: I should leave. Can they take dead blood?
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I actually I don't know. I
Speaker 2: would assume that you could probably get a tick to
Speaker 2: feed on recently deceased or blood for no.
Speaker 3: I think the leeches came up in leeches. I think
Speaker 3: they were like not into it. Did we do leeches? Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you did it. Well, we talked about leeches and
Speaker 3: New Fair un Locked.
Speaker 2: Oh right, I was gonna say, because we were got.
Speaker 2: I was I had leeches on the Summer of Fear
Speaker 2: for this year, and I booted them for ticks. But
Speaker 2: leeches will come up again someday.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it'd be weird if I just knew all this
Speaker 3: stuff about leeches. Yeah, I don't know about it because you
Speaker 3: told me all of it.
Speaker 2: We did do leeches on New Fair Unlocked about people
Speaker 2: who only.
Speaker 3: Pets they have little leashes for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Go, if you haven't listened to that episode yet, make
Speaker 2: sure you check it out. It's crazy.
Speaker 3: It'll make you feel great about all the decisions you
Speaker 3: make because you're like, at least I'm not a person
Speaker 3: who owns a leash. Yeah, I'm sorry, a leech leash.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, all this time that ticks spend bathing in
Speaker 2: your blood is part of why they are so prone
Speaker 2: to carrying blood born infections, because they have lots of
Speaker 2: time to soak up any disease that might be lingering
Speaker 2: in one animal system and then pass it on to
Speaker 2: the next person or creature. Okay, just a quick list
Speaker 2: of the diseases Jesus man the ticks carry. We're not
Speaker 2: going to talk about all of them in detail, but
Speaker 2: trust me, none of them are good. We've got alpha
Speaker 2: a gal syndrome, and a plasmosis, babe ceosis, bourbon virus,
Speaker 2: Colorado ticks.
Speaker 3: All of these sound awesome, by the way, we're talking
Speaker 3: bourbon babes alphas. Yeah, this should all be in the manisphere.
Speaker 3: Why are we talking about this?
Speaker 2: Andrew Tate is like I've I have given myself bourbon virus. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he probably wouldn't appreciate an alpha gal.
Speaker 3: But yeah, he wouldn't understand it, couldn't wrap his little
Speaker 3: head around it.
Speaker 2: But babe ciosis and bourbon virus back.
Speaker 3: To those would be those they would trick him in
Speaker 3: some sort of He would be entrapped by they be like, hey,
Speaker 3: you have what there?
Speaker 2: I feel like you could have gotten Alex Jones to
Speaker 2: sell one of those as a pill or something as
Speaker 2: as over as one of his supplements.
Speaker 3: Honestly, we'll sell him as a pill. If call us
Speaker 3: sounds like we haven't heard from who do we want?
Speaker 3: Earlier grapes and mots. So if we don't hear from Mots,
Speaker 3: we'll take babe virus.
Speaker 2: We wanted blue Chow, blue Choo and the babe virus
Speaker 2: go to get a hand in hand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if we don't hear from blue Choo by the
Speaker 3: end of the day, we'll take alpha gel babe virus. Well,
Speaker 3: not take it, we'll take it to sell. Got you kah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't want these items.
Speaker 2: In addition to the fun ones, we've got Colorado tick.
Speaker 3: Fever also fun sounding erlachiosis first one it sounds gross.
Speaker 2: Hard tick relapsing fever. Second one it sounds gross, heartland virus,
Speaker 2: that bad lime disease, the worst you can be, powacin virus, Ricketsia, parkeri, ricketosis,
Speaker 2: rocky mountain, spotted fever, soft tick, relapsing fever, a disease
Speaker 2: called starry that's just capital sta r.
Speaker 3: I yeah, that can't be helping.
Speaker 2: That soda tularima or sorry, tullerama, okay, and three sixty
Speaker 2: four D ricketziosis.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that would give them space ticks. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I do so. Colorado must be up there with Connecticut
Speaker 3: in terms of tick fever because there's a lot of
Speaker 3: Colorado yes stuff in there.
Speaker 2: Any any place. I think the heartland Colorado all this rot,
Speaker 2: but they've got lots of grassy, open spaces where these
Speaker 2: ticks are hanging out. I think is part of it. Sure,
Speaker 2: and yet none of these are good, despite how fun
Speaker 2: some of them do sound. I'd love to see the
Speaker 2: babe ciosis with three sixty four D richziosis. That would
Speaker 2: bet it an anime girl. Before we dive into all
Speaker 2: of the really terrible illnesses, I should note that it
Speaker 2: is not just humans and modern animals that have had
Speaker 2: to contend with ticks. We have evidence that tics have
Speaker 2: been around since the age of the dinosaurs. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 2: a team of paleontologists led by Enrique Penelverer published a
Speaker 2: paper describing five fossil ticks that they'd found preserved in
Speaker 2: ninety nine million year old Burmese amber. And one of
Speaker 2: these ticks. Amber doesn't get enough credit, It really doesn't.
Speaker 2: One of these ticks had been frozen mid grasp holding
Speaker 2: on to a feather. The amber dates to the middle
Speaker 2: of the Cretaceous, so that feather did not belong to
Speaker 2: a modern bird. That feather belonged to a dinosaur. Erican
Speaker 2: Museum of Natural History has an article about this find
Speaker 2: where it's noted that they don't know what kind of
Speaker 2: dinosaur the feather belonged to. It was not a chicken.
Speaker 2: Promise you was not a chicken. I don't know that
Speaker 2: anything with feathers would not have been a modern bird.
Speaker 2: At the time. There may have been very bird like dinosaurs,
Speaker 2: but you know, we're talking Archaeopteryx maybe, which I don't
Speaker 2: know if that was a Cretaceous dinosaur or not, but
Speaker 2: plenty of other dinosaurs had feathers. That's something that they're
Speaker 2: still studying and we're learning more about all the time.
Speaker 3: I almost feel like we should have something that we design,
Speaker 3: not you and I, but society that one day a
Speaker 3: year and you're not going to be told when it is,
Speaker 3: and it'll be a very small area, so you're just
Speaker 3: very unlucky if you're there at the time. A massive
Speaker 3: amount of amber is just dropped from the sky and
Speaker 3: that way we can just be like, and that's what
Speaker 3: a day in the life here was in a million years.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So when you say when you said amber,
Speaker 2: I thought you meant like rocks, like already hardened amber.
Speaker 2: You mean tree sap, Yeah, I like, yeah, whatever, they're
Speaker 2: hardened cool to amber. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean if someone has makes the same mistake you
Speaker 3: did when I put the order in, we might just
Speaker 3: have a bunch of dead people. Yeah, we're people regardless. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we might just have a bunch of crushed things. Yes,
Speaker 3: And uh, you know that's just what experimentation is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta break a few
Speaker 2: eggs there. It is crack a few skulls to freeze
Speaker 2: a society and amber.
Speaker 3: But it would be cool to freeze I guess we
Speaker 3: do that with photographs. Now we don't need to amber
Speaker 3: five people.
Speaker 2: That's true, although you can't pull DNA front well, you
Speaker 2: can't really pull DNA from amber anyway, because most of
Speaker 2: it doesn't survive very long.
Speaker 3: I think the high life is it's not like uh,
Speaker 3: drastic park.
Speaker 2: No, it's not, although there is, there's there's a weird company.
Speaker 3: It's always fed to us. He's like making colossal firal
Speaker 3: wolves and ship. Well, what are using what are they using?
Speaker 2: Colossal is is using much much, much more recently extinct species.
Speaker 2: There's a reason they haven't attempted dinosaurs. You know, they're
Speaker 2: attempting things that have died out within the past, you know,
Speaker 2: ten thousand years, maybe five thousand years people have on
Speaker 2: the last We'll ask and you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I've seen stuff that says genetic material the half life
Speaker 2: of genetic material is like five hundred years or something
Speaker 2: five hundred and twenty one years. But there are also
Speaker 2: discussions in this episode of finding remnants of genetic material,
Speaker 2: so maybe some of it can survive longer than others.
Speaker 2: But the point is we're not pulling. We can't drill
Speaker 2: into these ticks and remove enough dino DNA to go
Speaker 2: clone a dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: What you're saying is you're not interested in investing in
Speaker 3: my surprise liquefied amber. Well, day of the year.
Speaker 2: We can discuss, all right. So we don't know what
Speaker 2: kind of dinosaur the feather belonged to, but the tick
Speaker 2: was an extinct species that these scientists named Dinocraton dracouli
Speaker 2: or Dracula's terrible tick.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, they dote on them for fucking dying though
Speaker 3: the ticks are just seeing themselves out. Oh yeah, this
Speaker 3: type of tick. Yeah, I wish all their ticks would
Speaker 3: take note.
Speaker 2: They didn't seem too much larger than modern ticks to
Speaker 2: my But one specimen of this ancient eractid was frozen
Speaker 2: in time after it fed, and it was in gorged
Speaker 2: with so much blood that it had grown to eight
Speaker 2: times its normal size.
Speaker 3: Did you watch Alien Earth? I didn't.
Speaker 2: You've asked me this like ten times.
Speaker 3: I don't particularly like the show.
Speaker 2: You say that every time. There is part of why
Speaker 2: I haven't watched it.
Speaker 3: There is a tic esque mosquito ass alien, not alien
Speaker 3: like a xenomorph, but just not of our not of
Speaker 3: Earth alien mmmm, that feeds on blood or whatever, and
Speaker 3: they get so big. Yeah, and I'm just like, go ROAs, no,
Speaker 3: thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anything that gets like engorged with blood is like just
Speaker 3: so gross to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've definitely. Have you ever when you were a kid,
Speaker 2: did you ever see those little red mites that they
Speaker 2: have the crawl around sometimes that they have you mean earth, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's my MyAnna had this pile like these rocks out
Speaker 2: by her mailbox and they were always covered in these
Speaker 2: little red mites and if you crushed them, they left
Speaker 2: like a little red stain.
Speaker 3: And I, oh, I remember that. I thought they were
Speaker 3: just kind of red ant, So maybe they weren't.
Speaker 2: They might have been.
Speaker 3: I know what you're talking about. This, I remember just
Speaker 3: like leaving ancient like cave paintings of stains on our driveway. Yes,
Speaker 3: with these things body internals, Yeah, I haven't thought of
Speaker 3: it a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah I don't. I'm glad you know what I'm talking about,
Speaker 2: because for a second I was like, wait, was my
Speaker 2: grandmother just letting me play in like a parasite pit?
Speaker 2: And probably ticks when they feed. This is sort of
Speaker 2: an aside, but they can inflate up to fifty times
Speaker 2: stop it their original volume fifty times two hundred to
Speaker 2: six hundred times their body.
Speaker 3: Wait a centimeters, what're talking inches? Do they ever get
Speaker 3: to the point where we're like, that's a huge fucking.
Speaker 2: Tick kind of Yeah. Depending on the species, they can
Speaker 2: swell anywhere from the size of a poppy seed or
Speaker 2: a sesame seed to between the size of a pea
Speaker 2: and a grape.
Speaker 3: A grape, a grape, a fucking grape.
Speaker 2: Now, I don't know if that's hard ticks or soft
Speaker 2: ticks that can be soft to expand, like, yeah, but
Speaker 2: grow not a shower.
Speaker 3: Is that there's a level of accuracy in that Alien
Speaker 3: Earth episode that starts so much bigger, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 2: The one that was on my butt was not that big.
Speaker 2: I imagine a tick for a tick to get the size
Speaker 2: of a grape, I assume that tick has been there
Speaker 2: for a very long butt blood that's swollen on butt blood.
Speaker 2: This was a pretty cool fine too. A second amber
Speaker 2: specimen contained two ticks in case side by side lovers lovers.
Speaker 3: Lovers were they wanted to die together.
Speaker 2: They held each other, They held each other. On these ticks.
Speaker 2: Researchers identified tiny hairs from the larva of what are
Speaker 2: called skin beetles that today typically eat skin hair, feathers,
Speaker 2: and other traces of organic material left behind in nests.
Speaker 2: Since no mammal hairs have yet been found in cretaceous amber,
Speaker 2: this suggests that these skin beetles and the tick were
Speaker 2: active in a nest belonging to feathered dinosaurs, and they
Speaker 2: think nest and that this was some sort of a
Speaker 2: feeding in place situation because it was so wildly rare
Speaker 2: to find two ticks in case together. If they were
Speaker 2: just they wouldn't necessarily be feeding on the same animal
Speaker 2: and then both get incased in animal.
Speaker 3: It's a solitary feed normally, well.
Speaker 2: An animal can have more than one tick, but for
Speaker 2: but for them to have been encased in amber, the
Speaker 2: amber has to have dream tree sap has to have
Speaker 2: run down over them, which is hard to do if
Speaker 2: you're attached to a moving animal.
Speaker 3: Also, I don't know how fast tree sap moves. It
Speaker 3: doesn't seem super fast. So it's a little bit like
Speaker 3: that Austin power is like just move slow, yeah, like
Speaker 3: the slow steamroller thing. But it's just them too, being
Speaker 3: like it's kind on. Then it's like shot of it
Speaker 3: so far away still, so you're saying that one was
Speaker 3: eating a feather the other one was probably eating something else.
Speaker 2: Well, the idea being that whatever whatever these skin beetles
Speaker 2: and ticks were gathered around was probably something solitary.
Speaker 3: Oh, they were not two ticks.
Speaker 2: There were two ticks and skin beetles.
Speaker 3: Oh, so altogether they were at the same party. Y.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're all the same party. In that party got
Speaker 2: in case the ambers. So it's likely that that party
Speaker 2: was not.
Speaker 3: Moving, gotcha, So it would be a nest.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you look at the pictures of ticks
Speaker 2: in the article, you should, all of you should. You
Speaker 2: won't sleep, but you should go look at the pictures.
Speaker 2: It does. It sure doesn't seem like these ticks look
Speaker 2: very different than the tics we have today. In fact,
Speaker 2: to me, they look exactly the same, which suggests that
Speaker 2: I think evolution really kind of hit a home run
Speaker 2: when it game the tall that they You know, there's
Speaker 2: not a lot of animals that have survived from the
Speaker 2: time of the dinosaurs being exactly the same. You know, sharks,
Speaker 2: I guess, alligators. But ticks have also been spreading the
Speaker 2: same diseases that they do today for millions and millions
Speaker 2: of years. And we know this because we not only
Speaker 2: have evidence of ancient ticks. It turns out some of
Speaker 2: these ticks contain the fossilized remains of the bacteria that
Speaker 2: causes lime disease. So this is from entomology today. Quote.
Speaker 2: The findings were made by researchers from Oregon State Universe
Speaker 2: who studied fifteen to twenty million year old amber from
Speaker 2: the Dominican Republic that offers the oldest fossil evidence ever
Speaker 2: found of Borellia, a type of spiroshet like bacteria that
Speaker 2: to this day causes lime disease. Quote. A series of
Speaker 2: four ticks from Dominican amber were analyzed in the study,
Speaker 2: revealing a large population of spiroshite like cells that most
Speaker 2: closely resemble those of the present day Borellia species. Bacteria
Speaker 2: are an ancient group that date back about three point
Speaker 2: six billion years, almost as old as the planet itself.
Speaker 2: As soft bodied organisms, they are rarely preserved in the
Speaker 2: fossil record. However, amber is a free flowing tree sap
Speaker 2: that can trap and preserve material in exquisite detail as
Speaker 2: it slowly turns into a semi precious mineral.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people have amber jewelry and stuff, so I guess
Speaker 3: it's pretty wild. Yeah, very versatile.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The article goes on to say that scientists have
Speaker 2: documented the ancient presence of such diseases as malaria, leich Mania,
Speaker 2: and others.
Speaker 3: Amber is just thinking about right now. But Amber as
Speaker 3: a thing is like a hey, do you want to
Speaker 3: keep this? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: But for everything, it was like do you want to
Speaker 3: keep this disease? You want to keep this animal? He
Speaker 3: do you want to keep this person?
Speaker 2: In Ed's invention, I thought you meant it's something that
Speaker 2: people find and go, hey, should we keep this?
Speaker 3: No? I mean Amber. Actually the personification of Amber is like, hey,
Speaker 3: where were we going? Did you want to I'll hang
Speaker 3: on to it for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a pack rat type. Yeah, substance.
Speaker 3: It's pretty wild.
Speaker 2: Thank god for it. We found a lot. We know
Speaker 2: a lot about the ancient world from these.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, evidence even suggests, and I don't know if I
Speaker 2: don't think this evidence was necessarily pulled from ancient ticks,
Speaker 2: but evidence even suggests that dinosaurs could have been infected
Speaker 2: with Ricket seal pathogens, which is today known as Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain spotted fever. So one of those diseases we talked
Speaker 2: about earlier is something that the dinosaurs might have had.
Speaker 3: If dinosaurs could talk, a lot of them would be like,
Speaker 3: you don't look so good right now. I think you
Speaker 3: should light out.
Speaker 2: Can you even imagine? And the diseases the dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: Had and not one doctor.
Speaker 2: And not one doctor just misery. Yeah, anyway, what's humans
Speaker 2: came around? Ticks were eating good. Cultures around the world
Speaker 2: have been aware of and disgusted by ticks since the
Speaker 2: beginning of written records, as they should be.
Speaker 3: The first written record has saw something today.
Speaker 2: IW I'm disgusting.
Speaker 3: I'm fucking going home.
Speaker 2: The usual suspects all had something to say about ticks.
Speaker 2: Aristotle in three pot fifty five PC in his Historia
Speaker 2: and Amalium, stated that quote, tics are generated from couch grass,
Speaker 2: which is more of that spontaneous.
Speaker 3: Generation stuffmunculus stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that flies were birthed from shit because that's where
Speaker 2: the eggs were laid.
Speaker 3: I gotta get all this shit in common here so
Speaker 3: we can find out how many ticks we can make. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: If you want to understand that joke andnot just be
Speaker 2: grossed out by it, go listen to the Homoculous episode.
Speaker 3: To be grossed out by that.
Speaker 2: Pliny in eighty seventy seven in his Historia Naturalism.
Speaker 3: Pliny, Okay, I thought you were just adding a stroke
Speaker 3: or something, No, Pliny, so it will be an episode.
Speaker 2: Pliny in eighty seventy seven in his Historia Naturalis, referred
Speaker 2: to quote an animal living on blood with its head
Speaker 2: always fixed and swelling, being one of the animals which
Speaker 2: has no exit in parentheses anus for its food. It
Speaker 2: bursts with over repletion and dies from actual nourishment.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Ancient Egyptians wrote of a disease that they knew of
Speaker 2: as tick fever as early as fifteen fifty BC, and
Speaker 2: archaeologists have discovered an ancient Egyptian painting of a hyena
Speaker 2: like animal in a Western Thebes tomb, showing what appeared
Speaker 2: to be three distinct ticks. Guess where in its ear?
Speaker 3: Ah? Also, why did you draw that? Well?
Speaker 2: Clearly, I probably because someone loved their dog. Homer mentions
Speaker 2: fleas or ticks and flees in the Odyssey What Odysseus
Speaker 2: returns home his dog is covered in them. So I
Speaker 2: think people, you know, they knew that their animals, whether
Speaker 2: they love them or they just happened to be around that.
Speaker 2: This was something that like afflicted there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm just saying, you have this is your one
Speaker 3: opportunity to draw a portrait of your dog, and you
Speaker 3: leave out the fucking ticks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, back then I think maybe they were after they
Speaker 2: wanted to make sure that there was a recording of
Speaker 2: this stuff.
Speaker 3: Well then fucking put some tree sap on.
Speaker 2: It, dipping your dog's head and tree saund like we're
Speaker 2: gonna get these things off.
Speaker 3: I we had some work done around here at my
Speaker 3: house and it was the worst some of the some
Speaker 3: of the worst crafts with ship I've seen. Uh. And
Speaker 3: the people who painted just zero fox, like doesn't matter
Speaker 3: what they taped. Shit's just everywhere, Like everything's way where
Speaker 3: it shouldn't be paint wise. Yeah, and I am finding
Speaker 3: like spiders in carbonite, Like just rolled paint over a
Speaker 3: spider and there it is just like a full blown spider,
Speaker 3: Like you can make out what it was. There was
Speaker 3: like tape on the wall that's just like in there
Speaker 3: now Like so I just to your point, it's not amber.
Speaker 3: But I walk around my house now being like there's
Speaker 3: Han solo and carbonite. There's Han solo and carbonite, there's
Speaker 3: on salt garbonite.
Speaker 2: If your house survives hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps
Speaker 2: buried under a soot cloud or something, maybe those spiders
Speaker 2: will become what are studied. In the future, they'll be like, God,
Speaker 2: this craftsmanship was.
Speaker 3: They should already be studying the shit that blows out
Speaker 3: of the pipe in the backyard that they refuse to fix.
Speaker 2: Well, But in the future they might think They'll be like, wow,
Speaker 2: these were decorative. These were placed here as a memorial
Speaker 2: to these spiders. They must have been royal spiders.
Speaker 3: Man, I don't know this house already survived every earthquake.
Speaker 3: It's from nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2: That's true. I do. This is a complete aside, But
Speaker 2: sometimes when I drive around LA, I do like to
Speaker 2: think about how you know, I am super anxious and
Speaker 2: nervous about earthquakes, but you look at the majority of
Speaker 2: the houses in LA have survived a number of very
Speaker 2: large earthquakes.
Speaker 3: Just fine.
Speaker 2: But the best ancient ticks story that I found is
Speaker 2: a Navajo legend about how ticks became so flat. Hold
Speaker 2: on to your butts, as they say, this story is
Speaker 2: a journey, and you will not see the answer to
Speaker 2: the question of how did ticks become flat. You won't
Speaker 2: see it coming, but it's a great story.
Speaker 3: I do love a culture unable to say I don't know.
Speaker 3: They had to have it how flat you. I'd be like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, and then they're like, oh man, we
Speaker 3: better come up with something that we pass on for
Speaker 3: generations of how ticks got flat.
Speaker 2: This story is like a final destination level version of
Speaker 2: how a tick becomes flat.
Speaker 3: Never guess it.
Speaker 2: You'll never guess, but it's awesome. So one day, Coyote
Speaker 2: was wandering down a trail when he met old woman.
Speaker 2: Don't go that way. She warned him there's a giant
Speaker 2: up ahead who kills everyone. But Coyote, being coyote, wasn't scared.
Speaker 2: Giants don't frighten me. He said, I killed giants all
Speaker 2: the time. Holy shit, straight of coyote. I never knew wow,
Speaker 2: which oh well, which the story says was not true.
Speaker 2: He had never met one. So I guess coyotes being
Speaker 2: tricksters just.
Speaker 3: Lies about Coyote the animal, not a person named Coyote.
Speaker 2: Capital c Coyote, Kyote.
Speaker 3: Lear the spirit you want to get in trouble.
Speaker 2: The mythic embodiment of coyote. Coyote was a was a
Speaker 2: figure in Native American legends. He was a trickster figure.
Speaker 3: It's not ordering from acme no, okay, so I will
Speaker 3: stop picturing that right now.
Speaker 2: Giants don't frighten me, he said, I killed giants all
Speaker 2: the time, which was not true. He had never met one. Still,
Speaker 2: he kept walking along the way. He found a big
Speaker 2: fallen branch and picked it up like a club. I'll
Speaker 2: smash the giant over the head with this, he said. Eventually,
Speaker 2: coyote came to what looked like a huge cave in
Speaker 2: the middle of the path. He walked right in. Inside
Speaker 2: he found a woman crawling on the ground, starving and
Speaker 2: too weak to stand. What happened to you, Coyote asked, rude,
Speaker 2: how else will we know I'm trapped? She said, we
Speaker 2: all are great, cold, open to something. But I was
Speaker 2: thinking that trapped where The woman looked at him and laugh,
Speaker 2: You're already inside the giant. Coyote didn't understand. He thought
Speaker 2: he'd walked into a cave. But the cave was the
Speaker 2: giant's mouth, and now Coyote was deep inside its belly.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: He kept going and found more people lying around, half
Speaker 2: dead from hungrybos. The laziest of the They couldn't even
Speaker 2: they couldn't even munch on the innards of the giant.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: They told him there was no way out. The giant's
Speaker 2: belly was so enormous it filled an entire valley. Coyote
Speaker 2: thought about this and said, if we're inside the giant,
Speaker 2: then these cave walls must be meat. So he pulled
Speaker 2: out his knife and started cutting. Chunks came loose from
Speaker 2: the walls, fat and flesh from the inside of the
Speaker 2: giant's stomach. Coyote fed it to the starving people a
Speaker 2: whalefall bay. Basically, we're looking at you, Daniel Krause Kyote.
Speaker 2: Coyote fed it to the starving people, and they grew stronger.
Speaker 2: But now they had another problem. Again great writing, plot.
Speaker 3: Wise, Yeah, yeah, problem.
Speaker 2: They were still inside the giant, so coyote decided to
Speaker 2: kill it from the inside.
Speaker 3: This stick is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Speaker 2: Well, he thought the stick was going to be great
Speaker 2: for clubbing it over its head, but he didn't foresee
Speaker 2: anticipate that he would walk right into its mouth. So
Speaker 2: he asks, where's its heart? Someone pointed to a mountain
Speaker 2: in the distance deep inside the giant's body. It was
Speaker 2: pulsing and smoking like a volcano. That must be it,
Speaker 2: Coyote said, clearly, not a doctor.
Speaker 3: Kyo has interrational confidence.
Speaker 2: This guy would do well in Hollywood.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: He climbed to the giant's heart and began cutting into it.
Speaker 2: The giant felt the pain and spoke Coyote. It said,
Speaker 2: I know who you are. Stop cutting me and I'll
Speaker 2: open my mouth. You can all leave. But Coyote didn't stop.
Speaker 3: No, Coyote.
Speaker 2: He hacked deeper.
Speaker 3: Struck.
Speaker 2: He hacked deeper into the heart until lava began pouring out.
Speaker 2: That lava was the Giant's blood. The giant groaned. The
Speaker 2: whole world inside him shook. The ground trembled under everyone's feet.
Speaker 2: Coyote shouted run. The giant opened his mouth for one
Speaker 2: last breath, and all the people trapped inside came rushing out.
Speaker 2: But the last one through was wood Tick. As wood
Speaker 2: Tick tried to escape, the giant's teeth came crashing down,
Speaker 2: Coyote grabbed him and yanked him out just in time.
Speaker 2: Wood Tick survived, but he was crushed flat. Look at me,
Speaker 2: cried would Tick. I'm all flat now. Coyote shrugged that
Speaker 2: happened when I pulled you through. From now on, you'll
Speaker 2: always be flat, but be glad you're alive.
Speaker 3: What I'm that. The craziest thing is the tick is
Speaker 3: introduced so late in the story, only only.
Speaker 2: Part of the storytelling. It feels like a real cop out. Yes,
Speaker 2: this feels like somebody asked their grandfather, how did the
Speaker 2: wood Tick become flat? He just started I'm telling a story.
Speaker 3: Oh, He's like, I was already working on this coyote thing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: how can I put this into the coyote thing? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 3: that is wild. That's uh. It's just such a crazy
Speaker 3: It's like a ce story character that we meet for
Speaker 3: one second in a movie and then you're like, oh,
Speaker 3: the hero, but like the movies called wood Tick and
Speaker 3: you're like, oh, that guy who passed and asked for
Speaker 3: a coffee.
Speaker 2: Well, it would be like at the end of Scream
Speaker 2: if they pulled the mask off and it was just
Speaker 2: a character you hadn't met yet, you'd be like.
Speaker 3: Who didn't know? Yeah, who was that one?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just like, oh, well all right. I mean
Speaker 2: it's not really fair from a story perspective, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything else leading up to this was amazing. I'm
Speaker 3: very interested in what coyote is going to do next. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but they're like, here's a character. The rest of the
Speaker 3: movies will be following this other guy. Yes, so we
Speaker 3: introduced at the end.
Speaker 2: So that's how. That's how wood ticks became flat. According
Speaker 2: to the Navajo.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a great story. A lot of it
Speaker 3: was very good.
Speaker 2: So maybe wood tick was glad to be alive after this,
Speaker 2: but no one else was. Ticks are the world's number
Speaker 2: one spreader of zoonotic diseases, or diseases that's spread between
Speaker 2: animals and humans, and they seem to be one of
Speaker 2: the few creatures on Earth that are more trouble than
Speaker 2: they're worth.
Speaker 3: Get them out of here.
Speaker 2: Though, there are at least a handful of ticks that
Speaker 2: qualify as an endangered species stop it. None are represented
Speaker 2: on the International Union of.
Speaker 3: Giving a Shit.
Speaker 2: No, none are represented on the International Union for Conservation
Speaker 2: of Nature's Red List of threatened Species, which does feel
Speaker 2: like a real fuck you to the tick community. Yeah,
Speaker 2: some scientists know that this isn't so much because everybody
Speaker 2: feels that ticks are worthless, but because these endangered ticks
Speaker 2: feeding habits are inextricably linked to other endangered species.
Speaker 3: Oh jeez.
Speaker 2: So one such case is the Heath's possum tick, which
Speaker 2: is Australian tick which survives exclusively on the mountain pygmy
Speaker 2: possum living above the snow line on some of Australia's
Speaker 2: highest peaks. So because of its highly isolated habitat and
Speaker 2: its precarious reliance on a single host that is also threatened,
Speaker 2: it is considered on the brink of extinction. This was
Speaker 2: not flat out said, but I assume part of the
Speaker 2: difficulty there is the only way to keep it alive
Speaker 2: is to feed it endangered animals. Yeah, so they're kind.
Speaker 4: Of like, it's kind of like you wouldn't even be
Speaker 4: on the list if it wasn't for these Yeah, they
Speaker 4: are so connected to that particular type of possum that
Speaker 4: even if they wanted to, I guess they wouldn't be
Speaker 4: able to introduce a new kind of food to that tick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're fucked.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're not gonna air lift up some goats for
Speaker 3: you people to feed on, like right, but as an
Speaker 3: inconvenient place. I hope that.
Speaker 2: The ticks aren't the reason that the possum are endangered
Speaker 2: they're being fed on by.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know, and I'm never gonna know.
Speaker 2: You fine with that, We're never going to look into it,
Speaker 2: never Once. Biologists aren't the only ones wrestling with the
Speaker 2: inherent value of a tick's life.
Speaker 3: The Innocence Project is now they didn't do it.
Speaker 2: One Christian philosopher wrote, quote, certainly Job should have included
Speaker 2: tics in his litany of complaints to the Most High
Speaker 2: concerning the evils visit upon humans in the created world.
Speaker 2: It is hard to imagine the wisdom and any patience
Speaker 2: we might be called upon to exercise regarding the existence
Speaker 2: of tics.
Speaker 3: No one should be on his shit list to them
Speaker 3: because we have them. He probably brought to the little fucks.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, maybe two snuck on on the backs
Speaker 2: of some endangered possums or something.
Speaker 3: I didn't know how many trojan horses were on that arc.
Speaker 2: It's funny, though, in my research I actually found, and
Speaker 2: this is one of the only times this has happened
Speaker 2: in the course of this show, I actually found quite
Speaker 2: a few Christians asking why God would have created tics,
Speaker 2: Like most of the Bible, most other yeah, most other
Speaker 2: horrible subjects. I don't find you know a lot my rapists. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like age list of Christian philosophers or writers being like,
Speaker 2: what's the deal with ticks? But you know one of
Speaker 2: them wonders, I think, And this sort of speaks for
Speaker 2: many of them that I read. Many may ask why
Speaker 2: these ticks species are so infectious when ticks were originally
Speaker 2: designed by a benevolent God. Why would a good creator
Speaker 2: choose to design a creature ultimately capable of such considerable virulence?
Speaker 3: Boredom?
Speaker 2: Probably? I mean it's a goof.
Speaker 3: It's a goof sometimes God goofs. Look. I invented caves,
Speaker 3: and I feel like no one was using them until
Speaker 3: I added rain, and so maybe it's like a knock
Speaker 3: on effect for God.
Speaker 2: Well, but he filled those caves with soft ticks.
Speaker 3: Well, because the ticks kept complaining they had nothing to do,
Speaker 3: That's true, and so he's like, well, where you've been
Speaker 3: hanging out? I was like, in the caves, no one's
Speaker 3: ever in here, And He's like, I got an idea
Speaker 3: rain that'll bring them in there.
Speaker 2: Still not good enough?
Speaker 3: All right, Finally I put blood in them. I do
Speaker 3: like the idea of God being very collaborative.
Speaker 2: The answer that most of these Christian writers settled on
Speaker 2: is that the idea that before Adam and Eve sinned,
Speaker 2: ticks were good.
Speaker 3: Okay, like all animals. So you don't hear back from
Speaker 3: the big guy and you come up with a not
Speaker 3: as interesting story as ticks being flattened by a giant mouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they think the ticks were probably good. But after
Speaker 2: Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, there's this quote
Speaker 2: from the Bible. God told Adam that his sin would
Speaker 2: result in the ground being cursed and bringing forth thorns
Speaker 2: and thistles, which prompts another Christian writer to ask, what
Speaker 2: exactly did this corruption and curse mean? Did thorns and
Speaker 2: thistles become more prevalent and more of a problem. Could
Speaker 2: the same thing apply to ticks?
Speaker 3: That's what are the two ways to read the Constitution?
Speaker 2: There's like an originalist, so the originalist and not interpretation.
Speaker 3: And then whatever the fuck this guy is? Yeah, where
Speaker 3: it was like, I told you it's thorns and thistles.
Speaker 3: Don't add ticks as you got a because no, Well,
Speaker 3: in today's society, you know, tics are a bigger problem
Speaker 3: than So that's what I think God meant.
Speaker 2: I mean, we're not here doing an episode on thorns
Speaker 2: or thistles, exactly, dude.
Speaker 3: But we should be. But we're gonna do Scared of
Speaker 3: the Bible. We'll do every chapter.
Speaker 5: Oh, that'll be over twenty years, actually twenty chapters. Right,
Speaker 5: we already we made this joke of off show. But
Speaker 5: we did think about Somebody told me reading it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: somebody said we should do audiobooks, and I was saying
Speaker 5: we should do we.
Speaker 3: Read the Bible. Yeah, and not as a joke.
Speaker 2: Scared all the time version of the Bible. That's just
Speaker 2: the scary, gross parts, just the scary parts from the Bible,
Speaker 2: which we're doing now.
Speaker 3: So it's trademarked.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but fear not in the end times, after Christ returns,
Speaker 2: this same writer believes that quote, the curse will be
Speaker 2: reversed and dangerous wild animals like wolves, leopards, lions, and
Speaker 2: cobras will no longer be dangerous.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I haven't gotten that far into the Bible. Perhaps,
Speaker 3: but where does it say the second Coming of Christ
Speaker 3: that he has the obligation to make scary things not
Speaker 3: scary and to make ticks nice again. Well, okay, so
Speaker 3: this doesn't eOne discuss it with him?
Speaker 2: Well, this is literally so This is a little confusing
Speaker 2: the way I phrased it. The writer believes what I
Speaker 2: just said. But what I just said is a quote
Speaker 2: from Isaiah eleven, verse six through eight. So the curse
Speaker 2: will be reversed and dangerous, while the animals like wolves, leopards, lines,
Speaker 2: and cobras will no longer be dangerous. Is a quote
Speaker 2: from the Bible. So is they shall not hurt nor
Speaker 2: destroy in all my holy mountain, which is verse nine
Speaker 2: of Isaiah eleven. And so then the writer ads, could
Speaker 2: this also apply to mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks? I sure, hope.
Speaker 3: So. I love it. This guy is looking for anything
Speaker 3: that he can lump them in with the It's okay,
Speaker 3: it's not gonna work with that many even I get it.
Speaker 3: But fine, this is its own thing. What if have
Speaker 3: you seen Isaiah? What if he means this is also ticks?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I love the idea that something we have to
Speaker 2: look forward to in the end times is that after
Speaker 2: all the death and destruction and people being taken into heaven,
Speaker 2: is that ticks revert to just.
Speaker 3: Being cool after we're all gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just fine.
Speaker 3: I find that very interesting.
Speaker 2: I maybe they used to smell good. They revert to
Speaker 2: smelling good.
Speaker 3: It's just so reverse the curse. Isn't amazing reverse the curse.
Speaker 3: It's very fun thing to say.
Speaker 2: I wish we could reverse the curse on this show
Speaker 2: and all the horrible things that we've caused by talking
Speaker 2: about them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm keep waiting for the doorball to ring. And
Speaker 3: it's just a huge tick.
Speaker 2: As we discussed earlier, many of the ancient new ticks
Speaker 2: were trouble, but it wasn't until eighteen ninety three that
Speaker 2: two researchers named Theobald Smith and fl Kilbourne discovered that
Speaker 2: a disease known as Texas cattle fever that was killing
Speaker 2: tons of cattle in the Midwest was caused by the
Speaker 2: blood born parasite Babesia bigamina, which was transmitted by the
Speaker 2: cattle tick. This is generally considered the first scientifically described
Speaker 2: tick disease, and ranchers rejoiced when they finally had an
Speaker 2: explanation for what was killing their cattle and that they
Speaker 2: could finally work to stop it.
Speaker 3: Okay, Previous to that, it was just a lot of
Speaker 3: theology theologians being like, oh vu, there's a way to
Speaker 3: stop it. When Jesus comes back and says, hey, stop it. Well,
Speaker 3: and then these guys were like, think it might be
Speaker 3: a better way to do this.
Speaker 2: The Egyptians knew about tick fever in the fifteen hundred
Speaker 2: BC or whatever, and I read that.
Speaker 3: I thought that was just a people's enthusiasm about clocks.
Speaker 2: I thought it was their enthusiasm for ticks.
Speaker 3: The whole all of.
Speaker 2: King Tut's domain had to tick fear.
Speaker 3: Dude that summer, never forget it. A lot of thin people,
Speaker 3: they were all blood heavy. No.
Speaker 2: People knew that ticks spread disease for a long time,
Speaker 2: but they just didn't have the actual scientific understanding of
Speaker 2: there's a parasite in the blood that goes from one
Speaker 2: thing to another. They just thought ticks were somehow poisonous.
Speaker 3: And Craig Kilbourne, whoever these guys' names are, eighteen ninety three,
Speaker 3: that's what I was about to say. I'm like, it's
Speaker 3: got to be bumping up against the twentieth century because
Speaker 3: we as we know didn't even know that, like germs
Speaker 3: were a thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Texas cattle fever, though, is not one of
Speaker 2: the tick diseases that makes headlines. The first on everyone's
Speaker 2: list is lime disease, which is the most common disease
Speaker 2: spread by ticks in the country. The CDC estimates somewhere
Speaker 2: between three hundred thousand and half a million Americans get
Speaker 2: diagnosed with the lime disease every year. And this is
Speaker 2: this is your moment to shine. What do you know
Speaker 2: about lime disease beingsabilitating?
Speaker 3: Yes, it's debilitating. It it's and it's well. First off,
Speaker 3: it's from Connecticut. Named after Connecticut.
Speaker 2: That's why I'm giving you this opportunity. Yeah, Connecticut is
Speaker 2: like the Vatican for lime disease.
Speaker 3: It's the nutmeg state has a tick problem and the
Speaker 3: disease at which probably East Lime one of them. We've
Speaker 3: stayed in East Slime. We stayed there with Alex's family.
Speaker 3: Oh oh yeah, he lives in Lime. Yeah, one of
Speaker 3: the limes Eastern. I don't know whe other directions are,
Speaker 3: but we live. We were up there. They have a
Speaker 3: fun little old time like Charlie Chaplin movie theater and
Speaker 3: shit mm hmm. I just know it's real bad business
Speaker 3: man like I know, it can be very debilitating. I
Speaker 3: don't know if there's varying degrees of it, but you know,
Speaker 3: we know you find some people who it's like progressively debilitating.
Speaker 3: It's almost like a mass or something. I feel like
Speaker 3: when you get limes disease.
Speaker 2: That's all. That's all correct. It's very bad, and it's from.
Speaker 3: When's it from? Well, because I mean I was it
Speaker 3: around when I was a kid. It was okay, So
Speaker 3: the tick fear in Connecticut that I had the like
Speaker 3: Boogeyman tick syndrome of like check for tics, check for ticks.
Speaker 3: Lime disease was already a thing that people were like,
Speaker 3: that's why you're checking for tics.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, although or not, although and not only was
Speaker 2: it a thing that people had become that people were
Speaker 2: aware of when you were a kid. Lime disease, as
Speaker 2: you'll remember from the discussion we had a little bit earlier.
Speaker 2: We know it's been around for millions of years.
Speaker 3: Yes, I fucked that up. Huh, it's we know because
Speaker 3: they found it that amber.
Speaker 2: Ed ed pays somewhere between fifty and seventy five percent
Speaker 2: attention from I'm.
Speaker 3: Just saying that, like that shit from amber wasn't called
Speaker 3: lime disease.
Speaker 2: Well, correct, it wasn't.
Speaker 3: It was part of the bacteria that makes up lime disease.
Speaker 3: They found an amber, yes.
Speaker 2: Which comes into play a little bit later. That's important.
Speaker 2: But do you want to guess who else probably suffered
Speaker 2: from lime disease? A famous famous name discussed on the
Speaker 2: show a couple of times. Plato, No, no, no, you're
Speaker 2: probably not going to get this lot, Si the iceman.
Speaker 3: Is there anything this guy doesn't have on display?
Speaker 2: Not much. I feel like we've learned most of human
Speaker 2: history from what we discovered on them.
Speaker 3: And God, the sickest man got frozen.
Speaker 2: He's he's fifty three hundred years old. He was murdered.
Speaker 3: We know he had those arrow in him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an arrow. They don't know who killed him
Speaker 2: or why. Yeah, but he was murdered.
Speaker 3: He was spreading disease. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Another really interesting detail in his story that came up
Speaker 2: as I was researching this episode is that when scientists
Speaker 2: sequenced his genome, they also searched for traces of any
Speaker 2: non human DNA. They found evidence of a few different
Speaker 2: microbes in or on his body, including the bacteria that
Speaker 2: causes lime disease, Borellia BERGDORFERI. Adding to the evidence that
Speaker 2: he was actually suffering symptoms are his numerous tattoos, which
Speaker 2: I think we might know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the tattoos may have been medical and nature, like
Speaker 3: pointing to where he was itchy, or pointing to where.
Speaker 2: Yes, they are clustered around his spine, ankles, and behind
Speaker 2: his right knee, which are all places where you would
Speaker 2: experience the joint pain that lime disease can cause. So
Speaker 2: some some people think that perhaps they weren't decorative, but
Speaker 2: they were almost like a ritualistic Neolithic medicinal practice.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now, who listens to all that shit you did?
Speaker 2: That was pretty good. While Utsy's corpse is the oldest
Speaker 2: known evidence of lime infection in humans, it wasn't understood
Speaker 2: as a disease until a bunch of kids and a
Speaker 2: few adults in and around Old Lime.
Speaker 3: Stole on the body from where eat it.
Speaker 2: The biggest mistake they could ever made.
Speaker 3: Well, they heard that mummies make you look young or whatever.
Speaker 3: They thought it was a mummy powder.
Speaker 2: So it was old lime, Connecticut. I don't know where
Speaker 2: that is in relation to East Lime.
Speaker 3: I don't know either. I mean, if this is where
Speaker 3: it started, it should be called we don't go there,
Speaker 3: no more lime.
Speaker 2: Well, this group of people started coming down with what
Speaker 2: looked like juvenile rheumatoried darth, writing East lime.
Speaker 3: Is where our friend lives, which is why I always
Speaker 3: think he's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know where old lime is than in
Speaker 2: the trash because I ain't eaten no old lime.
Speaker 3: Get it out of here.
Speaker 2: These people started coming down with what looked like juvenile
Speaker 2: rheumatoid arthritis in nineteen seventy five, so this was not
Speaker 2: really studied until just a few years before you were born.
Speaker 2: Shit man, They had the work swollen, joints, fevers weird.
Speaker 3: So joints is a big thing.
Speaker 2: Joints is a big thing.
Speaker 3: So that's why when I thought earlier it was debilitating
Speaker 3: in like an MS way, where like I thought of
Speaker 3: MS because it's like a breakdown of the ability.
Speaker 2: To yeah, to walk some some people who get.
Speaker 3: And so it might not be the same symptoms that
Speaker 3: are actually making it happen, but I know that some
Speaker 3: people they need to require like walkers and things like that.
Speaker 2: Yes, two moms, Polly Murray and Judith Minch shark tank
Speaker 2: and said do we have an idea for you. It's
Speaker 2: called tattoos that heal you. Two moms, Polly Murray and
Speaker 2: Judith Minch started calling Yale and the Connecticut Health Department.
Speaker 2: So they finally got two Yale rheumatologists, Alan Steer and
Speaker 2: Stephen Malowista, and these two came to investigate. They pieced
Speaker 2: together that whatever this is, it was spread by ticks,
Speaker 2: and they named it lime arthritis. But it wasn't until
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one that Willie Bergdorffer, a Swiss trained medical
Speaker 2: entomologist working at Rocky Mountain Labs in Hamilton, Montana, found
Speaker 2: the true cause of the disease, wriggling around in the
Speaker 2: gut of a deer tick from Shelter Island.
Speaker 3: Wait, gut, Oh, so the inside the tick in blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Inside the gut of the tick where the blood
Speaker 2: was he found this corkscrew shaped bacterium called a spiral keet,
Speaker 2: and in nineteen eighty two he confirmed that this spiral
Speaker 2: heat was the cause of lime. I think I actually
Speaker 2: mispronounced spiro keet earlier in this episode as like spiroshet
Speaker 2: or something. It's spirokeet getting better, guys, I'm getting better,
Speaker 2: spiro Shelley a year spiroshet. He sounds like a great pasta.
Speaker 2: Sounds like a delicious kind of pasta.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: A year later, this bacteria that he discovered was named
Speaker 2: Brellia bergder Ferry in his honor. I hope they threw
Speaker 2: him as well. Yeah, remember Willie's name. We're gonna come
Speaker 2: back to him later. But part of the reason the
Speaker 2: disease was such a mystery for so long is that
Speaker 2: most people who come down with lime don't even know
Speaker 2: that they were bit by a tick.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now, isn't there like a ring associated with it? Yes,
Speaker 3: but I feel like by the time you see that,
Speaker 3: it's probably too late.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not that it's too late, it's just that, well,
Speaker 2: it's you're already infected.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's called a bullseye rash. And it looks like a
Speaker 2: bright red ring. It's a rash in the shape of
Speaker 2: a ring, and the center of that ring, it won't
Speaker 2: be red in the center, but the center of that
Speaker 2: is where the tick bite occurred. That is crazy, the ring.
Speaker 3: It's just crazy that our body had that reaction, or
Speaker 3: that this thing gave that to bodies. Yes, where it's like,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry about what I did to your body, and
Speaker 3: now now you know it's happened. Yeah, and I'm gonna leave,
Speaker 3: by the way, I've already left.
Speaker 2: Yeah, left a long time ago. Usually, But it's just
Speaker 2: pretty wild.
Speaker 3: It's just an interesting piece of evolution or intelligent design,
Speaker 3: whatever it may be. It's just kind of crazy that
Speaker 3: it left like a circle, yeah, where it ruined your life.
Speaker 2: And twenty percent of cases never even get the circle.
Speaker 2: Twenty to thirty percent of cases never get the circle,
Speaker 2: and so they may never know that they were bit
Speaker 2: by a tick. They don't see the rash, and so
Speaker 2: they just get flu like symptoms and they get the
Speaker 2: joint pain, sometimes long term neurological and cardiac problems, and
Speaker 2: in rare cases, the infection, the bacterial infection spreads to
Speaker 2: the heart and can become fatal, but it's usually caught
Speaker 2: well before that, especially now that we know what it is.
Speaker 2: Once it's caught, it can be treated with a ten
Speaker 2: to fourteen day course of antibiotics that cleans up cases
Speaker 2: in most people. Then there's chronic lime disease, which is
Speaker 2: part of what you've been discussing, and that is the
Speaker 2: term for patients who continue to suffer symptoms for months
Speaker 2: or years after their body is clear of the Borellia bacteria.
Speaker 2: There is a whole big controversy around chronic lime that
Speaker 2: touches really similar territory to our Morgallon's episode that we
Speaker 2: just did, so we won't get into the whole thing.
Speaker 2: But I found a quote from infectious disease specialists Jake
Speaker 2: Scott who told Stanford Medicine quote, when patients tell me
Speaker 2: about ongoing fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulties, I believe them completely.
Speaker 2: These symptoms are real and debilitating, but the science shows
Speaker 2: us they aren't caused by persistent line bacteria, so we
Speaker 2: need to look for other treatable causes. So basically, a
Speaker 2: lot of times when someone has chronic lime, they check
Speaker 2: to see if there's any of these bacteria in the body.
Speaker 2: There aren't, and now there's a question of.
Speaker 3: Well, what do we do, because we know how to
Speaker 3: get rid of the bacteria, right, but we don't know
Speaker 3: how to get rid of whatever right.
Speaker 2: And so there's still a mystery as to does the
Speaker 2: bacteria change something in some people's bodies so that this
Speaker 2: becomes an ongoing problem. There's some people who believe that
Speaker 2: these bacteria have an ability to like essentially like hibernate
Speaker 2: in your in your tissues, and and after over a
Speaker 2: certain period of time, they come back out and they
Speaker 2: cause problems. And then when doctors go to look for them.
Speaker 2: They rehibernate or whatever. There's there's a lot of theories
Speaker 2: as to like what's really going on, some of them
Speaker 2: more grounded in reality than others. But I do believe
Speaker 2: that a lot of doctors understand that something is going
Speaker 2: on and they just don't they don't know how to
Speaker 2: treat it. My dad actually told me at least that
Speaker 2: he suffered from chronic lime disease in when I was
Speaker 2: like end of high school through college. He was struggling
Speaker 2: with something and I wasn't home very much, so I
Speaker 2: wasn't around him. But I remember him saying that it
Speaker 2: was a tick problem and he thought it was ongoing lime.
Speaker 2: And but then for him, once he moved back to Italy,
Speaker 2: it seems like a cleared up.
Speaker 3: So I guess it wasn't.
Speaker 2: I guess it wasn't. You know, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know. You have a family member suffering from this,
Speaker 2: so you know people well, family friends, family friends. So
Speaker 2: all that said, lime disease is not really the scariest
Speaker 2: disease you can get from a tick. There are worse ones.
Speaker 2: The scariest one I found in my recent search is
Speaker 2: called poassin disease named after Poasin, Ontario, where the first
Speaker 2: known case is They identified in nineteen fifty eight, a
Speaker 2: five year old boy from a nearby town developed severe encephalitis,
Speaker 2: which is like swelling of the brain and died or
Speaker 2: I guess is it swelling or is it you get
Speaker 2: like liquid in your brain.
Speaker 3: Either one can kill you.
Speaker 2: It sounds like during his autopsy doctors were able to
Speaker 2: isolate the virus from his brain and study it for
Speaker 2: decades after that. Poasin was just basically sort of this footnote.
Speaker 2: It was like a curiosity. It was in textbooks, but
Speaker 2: it almost never showed up in people.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things where Doctor House at the
Speaker 3: end of the episode was yeah, maybe it's Poassi. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but also that thing, I think there's like a real
Speaker 3: term for it that doctors have where it's like it's
Speaker 3: probably not the craziest most obscure thing. First, like it's
Speaker 3: probably just strepped through you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 3: don't go straight to like it might it's fucking fasciitis
Speaker 3: or whatever. I was like, Nah, it probably isn't.
Speaker 2: From nineteen fifty eight to nineteen ninety eight, there was
Speaker 2: less than one human case per year year across the
Speaker 2: US and Canada. Okay, but then in the early two
Speaker 2: thousands it started showing up more often and worse.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, like low rise genes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So four things make poasens genuinely the most
Speaker 2: frightening disease I think that you can get from a tick.
Speaker 2: The first is a transmission speed. So per the Vermont
Speaker 2: Department of Health, one study showed that an infected tick
Speaker 2: can transmit poassens in as little as fifteen minutes. Lime disease,
Speaker 2: by comparison, typically requires twenty four to thirty six hours
Speaker 2: of being attached to the host.
Speaker 3: Question though, if it's attached, if a lime disease tick
Speaker 3: jumps on you, does its whole fucking at home surgery? Yeah,
Speaker 3: and then you grab its ass after twenty minutes, Could
Speaker 3: it have done it in that twenty minutes or are
Speaker 3: you in the clear because it takes like three hours.
Speaker 3: It just it doesn't matter, right because the bacteriy you
Speaker 3: can get in at any moment. But I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's the question is like, like, if you get a
Speaker 3: tick out off your ass in like in the day
Speaker 3: you found it, are you probably go with lime disease?
Speaker 3: Like he didn't get it in there.
Speaker 2: Correct, it's unlikely that it would transfer in less than
Speaker 2: twenty four hours. Okay, with Poassin's by the time you
Speaker 2: notice the tick, you probably have the disease.
Speaker 3: But almost no one ever has this. He's just like
Speaker 3: it comes from lazy ticks, well, who are just like,
Speaker 3: can't be bothered to write.
Speaker 2: Someone people used to never have it.
Speaker 3: You're saying it's on the rise, like the g Yeah,
Speaker 3: so who's getting now? Just everybody?
Speaker 2: Lots more people, Yeah, lots more people.
Speaker 3: And what was that? What happens when you get that?
Speaker 3: You turned into a tick?
Speaker 2: That brings me to point number two?
Speaker 3: Fucking better or not be what I just said?
Speaker 2: It's not okay, it's a little worse.
Speaker 3: Oh no.
Speaker 2: When Poassin becomes severe, which is about ten percent.
Speaker 3: Of cases, remember ten acting tough acting? In fact that
Speaker 3: acting was it fast acting as well at one point
Speaker 3: in this case is fact as facts acting Potassin.
Speaker 2: Poe Assin poet.
Speaker 3: Either way, we're gonna have to dig up John Madden
Speaker 3: for this.
Speaker 2: When Poeasin goes severe, it goes catas traphic. Most cases
Speaker 2: are asymptomatic or just appear to be mild. Flu Symptoms
Speaker 2: might include fever, headache, nausea, occasional confusion, and weakness. With
Speaker 2: severe poacid illness, victims should be hospitalized because the symptoms
Speaker 2: can worsen. If not treated, symptoms can extend to meningen
Speaker 2: meningitis basically meninginocephalitis.
Speaker 3: There we go, okay.
Speaker 2: If not treated, symptoms can extend to meninginocephalitis, which may
Speaker 2: include seizures, aphasia, cranial nerve policies, paralysis, and altered mental states.
Speaker 2: About ten percent of cases go neuroinvasive, which means the
Speaker 2: virus crosses the blood brain barrier and per the.
Speaker 3: Same I don't even have that barrier to keep this
Speaker 3: shit out, I'm saying. But if it doesn't work, that works.
Speaker 2: Most of the time. But when I mean, that's the
Speaker 2: same thing that the brain eating domba we talked about. Yeah,
Speaker 2: those amibas have to cross the blood brain barrier to
Speaker 2: get to your brain, and the quickest way is up
Speaker 2: through your schnauzo man. So about ten percent of cases
Speaker 2: go neuinvasive. At about ten percent of those die and
Speaker 2: roughly half of the survivors are left with permanent neurological damage.
Speaker 3: So it is tough acting finase, it's.
Speaker 2: Tough acting, fast acting John Madden bad as in poacin,
Speaker 2: Damn Dude, muscle weakness, paralysis, memory problems, and personality changes.
Speaker 3: I have this. Every time we do an episode. I'm
Speaker 3: always like I have it.
Speaker 2: Regellance can all result from this permanent neurological damage. And
Speaker 2: as I mentioned, this disease is getting worse. There is
Speaker 2: less than one case per year up until nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 2: From twenty six to twenty sixteen, that climb to nine
Speaker 2: per year, and Maine has had four poass in deaths
Speaker 2: alone in the past decade, including one as recently as twenty.
Speaker 3: Twenty four coming over the border.
Speaker 2: And there is still no treatment, no vaccine, nothing can
Speaker 2: be done. The treatment Yell Medicine describes is quote supportive,
Speaker 2: meaning they basically put you out of ventilator and they
Speaker 2: manage your brain swelling and hope you survive.
Speaker 3: That is that is worse? I would say it's worse
Speaker 3: because a lot more people get lime and it could
Speaker 3: maybe be knocked up by steroids. Sounds like every person
Speaker 3: who gets this diets for it.
Speaker 2: That's it, Bud, Sorry, well you got bit ten percent?
Speaker 2: Is that's it?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's like online dating numbers, got it, but pretty
Speaker 3: small the top in anything.
Speaker 2: If it swipes right on breaking your blood brain barrier though,
Speaker 2: you're you're definitely going to have a bad time. It's
Speaker 2: not going to be a good Okay.
Speaker 3: Okay, I I had thought that that nine cases were
Speaker 3: all dead zo's or like ventilator.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good question. Well, Maine has had four
Speaker 2: poassin deaths in the past decade. I don't know if
Speaker 2: the number of cases that are mentioned here we're all
Speaker 2: fatal or not. It doesn't mention if any were or not.
Speaker 2: But in any case, the disease is becoming more widespread.
Speaker 3: So Amibas are moving north, yeah, and tough act in.
Speaker 3: Poassin is coming south Canada down and then Amimbas are
Speaker 3: coming from the south up north.
Speaker 2: It's spreading everywhere.
Speaker 3: So where I don't know, I tell you this, but Kansas,
Speaker 3: you're you're being You're in a war on two fronts.
Speaker 3: You don't even realize it.
Speaker 2: Well, the third disease we're going to cover is also
Speaker 2: coming from the south of North, So Kansas is gonna
Speaker 2: get ding double duty here. Okay, Alpha gal We're back
Speaker 2: to our main gal Alpha.
Speaker 3: Gal Alpha gal Gado.
Speaker 2: It's less fatal. The good the good ed had to say,
Speaker 2: alpha gal gado the way that some people just have
Speaker 2: to sneeze. Is this third disease I want to cover
Speaker 2: is less fatal than poassi ins and bore, probably less
Speaker 2: fatal than lime, but it is definitely the weirdest on
Speaker 2: this list.
Speaker 3: So now you're getting turned into a tick.
Speaker 2: I actually thought that this was when I first read this,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, this is like a more gallons thing.
Speaker 2: This is like maybe it's real, maybe it's not, but
Speaker 2: it's it's real.
Speaker 3: It turns out real.
Speaker 2: It turns out one hundred percent real. There is a
Speaker 2: tick in the United States that if it bites you
Speaker 2: can leave you permanently allergic to red meat, not just beef, pork, lamb, tenison,
Speaker 2: any kind of mammal meat in general, and in many
Speaker 2: patients dairy as well. The resulting allergic reaction can range
Speaker 2: from rashes and hives to nausea to full on anaphylactic
Speaker 2: shock that requires hospitalization, and in twenty twenty four we
Speaker 2: had the first fatal case that struck a man who
Speaker 2: died a few hours after eating a hamburger. It sounds
Speaker 2: more like a wizard's curse than a real disease.
Speaker 3: This don't. I'm trying to like wrap my hand around it.
Speaker 2: But according to the CDC, which I feel like is
Speaker 2: something we've said a lot in this episode. It's called
Speaker 2: alpha gal syndrome and it works like this. So quote
Speaker 2: this is what the CDC says. Alpha gal is a
Speaker 2: sugar molecule that is naturally produced in the bodies of
Speaker 2: most mammals, but not in people. It can also be
Speaker 2: found in the saliva of some ticks. So when that
Speaker 2: tick bites you, it transfers alpha gal from its saliva
Speaker 2: into your blood, and the body's natural defenses or immune
Speaker 2: system can identify alpha gal as a threat and trigger
Speaker 2: an allergic reaction. But not right not at the bit.
Speaker 3: Because they're doing that thing that they do where they
Speaker 3: fucking put you under hypnosis while.
Speaker 2: You oh yeah, you're like yes please.
Speaker 3: The most common they're not the bacteria you're looking for,
Speaker 3: like Jedi mind trick your white blood cells or whatever.
Speaker 2: The most common alpha gal carrying tick in the US
Speaker 2: is a tick we mentioned earlier, the lone Star tick.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: It is originally from the state of Texas, Okay, but
Speaker 2: it is not named after the state of Texas. It
Speaker 2: is named for the fact that it has Each of
Speaker 2: these ticks has a single white dot on its back
Speaker 2: that looks like a lone star.
Speaker 3: So when you're a hammer, everything was like a nail.
Speaker 3: I guess you're already in Texas. Can you find it?
Speaker 3: And that's probably where your brain went.
Speaker 2: But thanks to climate change, which I think is probably
Speaker 2: the reason a lot of these diseases, the amibas are
Speaker 2: moving north. On climate change, we're getting warmer winters, longer
Speaker 2: active tick seasons, and the deer populations are exploding and
Speaker 2: they often hitch rides on deer, so that has helped
Speaker 2: the lone Star tick move steadily nor in East. As
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty six, it is well established in New York,
Speaker 2: New Jersey, Connecticut and showing up as far north as
Speaker 2: main where a lot of these ticks and tick based
Speaker 2: diseases are starting to show up.
Speaker 3: A lot of the grounds going sour is what they
Speaker 3: say about that place right in uh Pet Cemetery.
Speaker 2: Yep, yep. The what's his?
Speaker 3: Herman Monster doesn't matter?
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter, Yeah, I had he has another quote
Speaker 2: from that movie.
Speaker 3: That probably is another name too.
Speaker 2: That credit as Herman Munster. As according to a twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three CDC report. Between twenty ten and twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: the agency identified roughly one hundred and ten thousand suspected
Speaker 2: cases of alpha gal in the US, and they note
Speaker 2: in the same report that the real number is almost
Speaker 2: certainly higher than that.
Speaker 3: Do you think In many ways, I always thought of
Speaker 3: the hamburglar as a person who loves hamburgers and needs
Speaker 3: to steal them. Presumably the sacramanburgers will be eaten by
Speaker 3: him later or sold on the black market unclear, But
Speaker 3: in many ways, these ticks are the ill hamburglars.
Speaker 2: They're stealing burglars, burglar all of us.
Speaker 3: Yep. They're stealing the enjoyment of hamburgers, yes, away from
Speaker 3: their victims.
Speaker 2: Well, and part of what is crazy that I don't
Speaker 2: get into really, But what was in the research is
Speaker 2: that the first rash of cases where people started noticing
Speaker 2: that something very bizarre was happening was in the South,
Speaker 2: where people who had spent their whole lives eating lots
Speaker 2: of red meat and sausages and hamburgers.
Speaker 3: Okay, barbecue and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all of a sudden started getting these wild allergic
Speaker 2: reactions to me that they never had before. And that's
Speaker 2: part of what started the investigation into like, what the
Speaker 2: fuck is going on red meat? I don't I have.
Speaker 3: I haven't had red meat since October of last year.
Speaker 2: I have not eaten red meat. Well, i've There's been
Speaker 2: a few instances for one reason or another, but I
Speaker 2: generally ninety nine percent of the time have not had
Speaker 2: red meat since like two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: I haven't had it since October, which is the longest
Speaker 3: patch since the crib. Yeah, and so, but the thing
Speaker 3: is is that we might be eaten alive nightly by
Speaker 3: these and we don't even know that's true. You're not
Speaker 3: testing it.
Speaker 2: I haven't had a tick bite since two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: It that you know of because you're not having anaphylactic
Speaker 3: shock when you eat a cheeseburger.
Speaker 2: Have I talked on this show before about the allergic
Speaker 2: reaction I had when I first met my wife slash
Speaker 2: now with then the girlfriend.
Speaker 3: You had an allergic reaction when you first met Anna.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's when I first started. I mean, it wasn't.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like I met her and had an allergic
Speaker 2: reaction to her.
Speaker 3: But it's pretty quiet. The first date, my throat closed uff.
Speaker 2: I was struggling to breathe. No when I when when
Speaker 2: we first met, when I first started staying over at
Speaker 2: her place, I started waking up in the mornings with
Speaker 2: my lips completely swollen, like borderline anaphylaxis, Like.
Speaker 3: She was injecting your lips when you slept.
Speaker 2: It looked like it. It looked like it looked like
Speaker 2: I was having like I looked like, who's that YouTuber?
Speaker 2: Couldn't tell you, James Charles, I think.
Speaker 3: She genuinely doesn't not help me. I don't know who
Speaker 3: that is.
Speaker 2: I looked insane in the mornings, and they were itchy,
Speaker 2: and it was clearly an allergic reaction to something, and
Speaker 2: I'd never been an alluri just before. Like for months,
Speaker 2: I was like, because it didn't happen every time that
Speaker 2: I saw her. It didn't happen like every time that
Speaker 2: I ate there.
Speaker 3: It like about every time you stayed over.
Speaker 2: It happened fairly often when I stayed over, okay, and
Speaker 2: could not figure out what the fuck was going on.
Speaker 2: So I went I got tested for all kinds of allergies.
Speaker 2: Everything came back negative.
Speaker 3: You were like, damn, girl, wash these sheets.
Speaker 2: I started.
Speaker 3: I was leaving with fucking pink eye, and my lips
Speaker 3: are all like eight times bigger.
Speaker 2: I was like going around her apartment literally, like looking
Speaker 2: at objects or foods. At one point, I was like,
Speaker 2: maybe she had like pink salt instead of like more
Speaker 2: than she And I was like googling, like can you
Speaker 2: have allergic reaction to Himalayan pink salt? And like some
Speaker 2: people could, So I was like, well, maybe I won't
Speaker 2: use that salt anymore, like could not figure it out.
Speaker 2: And she she was like she was like I was
Speaker 2: so worried because I was. She was like, I'd finally
Speaker 2: met this guy that I was in love with, and
Speaker 2: it seemed like he was allergic to me somehow. And
Speaker 2: I was like, no, no.
Speaker 3: No, your fucking dirty ass.
Speaker 2: Turns out it was the arm and hammer baking soda
Speaker 2: toothpaste that she had. And the reason that it was
Speaker 2: not every night was because she had a there was
Speaker 2: like a.
Speaker 3: Couple of reser teeth every once every seven day. No,
Speaker 3: she just rushes the one she wants to get.
Speaker 2: It was when I used that toothpaste. But she also
Speaker 2: had like a crest, like a blue you know, toothpaste,
Speaker 2: and you know, sometimes they'd be like, oh, I want
Speaker 2: the minty fresh, right, you know, so I would just
Speaker 2: do the other one, no crust and so so yeah,
Speaker 2: I and I don't even remember how I figured that out,
Speaker 2: but at some point, But.
Speaker 3: Then, did you have to tell her you can't use
Speaker 3: it because then if you kiss, you're gonna get all
Speaker 3: blow up? Like?
Speaker 2: Oh we she it was funny she had bought.
Speaker 3: It was to become an Akward Fresh house.
Speaker 2: No she well, yeah, she'd bought like a fifteen pack
Speaker 2: at Costco or something. And I was like, in the trash, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's going out, and I should I should. I should
Speaker 2: go look it up again someday because the I forget
Speaker 2: there was an active ingredient in it. That was the
Speaker 2: thing that I was allergic to. It wasn't baking soda
Speaker 2: or whatever, but it.
Speaker 3: Was the generational wealth.
Speaker 2: Oh that's what it was.
Speaker 3: I had arm and ammers, army ammers, Yes, that's his family.
Speaker 2: It was the it's in whatever the active ingredient is
Speaker 2: is in other armen Hammer products. Because I remembered years prior,
Speaker 2: and I hadn't even ever thought about it until this
Speaker 2: had happened, but I had had a really bizarre allergic
Speaker 2: reaction to underarm deodorant. Oh, where I was getting these
Speaker 2: big red welts all under my arms and I don't remember,
Speaker 2: but I am almost one thousand percent certain that I
Speaker 2: must have been using an arm and hammer.
Speaker 3: Because they make that too deodorant.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he was now.
Speaker 3: Old spies. Yeah, but not like the one our dad's
Speaker 3: had that weird smell. No. I also use old spice,
Speaker 3: just like a basic old spice, So I'm using some
Speaker 3: sort of fresh scent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: My dad and everyone of his generation had like that
Speaker 3: little old spice like bottle and it was just fucking
Speaker 3: the roastest smell to me. Yeah, lot was a loan
Speaker 3: where I don't know what if that was even what
Speaker 3: that is necessarily, No, I.
Speaker 2: Think I don't think old spices.
Speaker 3: It might have been after shave.
Speaker 2: Who knows after shave.
Speaker 3: I was just like, yeah. And so the fact that
Speaker 3: they figured out there are other smells and have become
Speaker 3: pretty successful company. Yeah, they had weird commercials.
Speaker 2: So maybe you can put that up on the patreot.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's some bonus material for the fans.
Speaker 3: But pictures of you with bumps on your body, oh.
Speaker 2: I could give you pictures of me.
Speaker 3: Well, what is the thing we're putting up the story.
Speaker 2: We can leave the story in the episode, or you
Speaker 2: can just cut it out. It's got nothing to do
Speaker 2: with the rest of the episode, I guess, and I'll
Speaker 2: definitely I'll after this, I'll show you some of the
Speaker 2: pictures because I took selfies being like, what is happening
Speaker 2: to me? So anyway, back to red meat disease. The
Speaker 2: CDC's best current estimate is that as many as four
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty thousand Americans might be living with alpha
Speaker 2: gal syndrome right now without ever having gotten a formal diagnosis.
Speaker 2: That gap is mostly because the syndrome is so new
Speaker 2: that doctors out side of heavily effective regions have either
Speaker 2: never heard of it or have only ever heard of
Speaker 2: it in passing. So sometimes patients spend years bouncing between
Speaker 2: specialists without anyone ever connecting the dots to go, oh, hey,
Speaker 2: did you ever have a tick bite? Or you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it's that This though, has resulted in an explosion
Speaker 2: of headlines recently about alpha gal, which is one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that I ended up doing this episode was
Speaker 2: I had a few weeks ago I saw some headline
Speaker 2: about this tick disease and.
Speaker 3: You're just like you're on some weird forum. It's like,
Speaker 3: who can I need Hamburgers? Now?
Speaker 2: Am still hanging out with all my allergy friends. It's
Speaker 2: starting to become one of the more well known tick
Speaker 2: or they call them vector based diseases now, which is
Speaker 2: the term for when like the tick is the vector,
Speaker 2: it's not actually the cause of the disease, the bacteria
Speaker 2: in its guts, like.
Speaker 3: The way bubonic plague with like a rat would be
Speaker 3: a vector.
Speaker 2: Yet well the flea would be the vector vessels. I
Speaker 2: don't know, you know, ask a scientist. But here's the
Speaker 2: really other bad news and fuck up thing about this
Speaker 2: alpha gal disease, the alpha gal molecule that your body
Speaker 2: can then start to have. Once it's introduced, you can
Speaker 2: start to have this allergic reaction to it. It's not
Speaker 2: just in food, It's in fucking like everything.
Speaker 3: Excuse me. It's I thought it was like a weird
Speaker 3: sugar that other mammals made.
Speaker 2: It's in meat and dairy. It's in gelatin, which means.
Speaker 3: Which is in horsebones.
Speaker 2: Yep, A lot of these things are are animal derived.
Speaker 2: But so like any gel pill, any gel capsule pill.
Speaker 3: Is this because you said that the sugar thing is
Speaker 3: in these other mammals. Yes, so by virtue of their
Speaker 3: body at any point producing it means that the byproduct
Speaker 3: of them has It.
Speaker 2: Is in many of these products.
Speaker 3: Yes, and you're having allergic reaction, not to red meat necessarily,
Speaker 3: but to this weird right.
Speaker 2: Yes, it most often shows up in red meat, but
Speaker 2: it can show up.
Speaker 3: In gelatin and gel caps.
Speaker 2: And gummy vitamins. It's in a compound called magnesium stereiate,
Speaker 2: which is in basically every supplement on the shelf in
Speaker 2: every store in America. It's in glycerin based soaps. It's
Speaker 2: in body washes, it's in some vaccines, it's in snake
Speaker 2: anti venom. It's in the most it's the most common
Speaker 2: blood thinner in the world, is called pig derived heeperin,
Speaker 2: which is a blood thinner. It can be in that.
Speaker 2: It's in some cow tissue, prosthetic heart valves. It's in
Speaker 2: surgical sutures, tattoo inks, and contact and contact lens solutions,
Speaker 2: which is extra crazy because imagine you're an alpha gal
Speaker 2: patient who needs an important surgery. The antibio the capsules
Speaker 2: you're antibiotics, or it could send you in anaphylactic shock,
Speaker 2: the sutures could send you into anaphalactic shock, the heart
Speaker 2: valve replacement, the all.
Speaker 3: This has to be in the pit next season.
Speaker 2: It really should be call us.
Speaker 3: It is crazy. I know that there are latex versus
Speaker 3: non latex glove things for like they ask you about
Speaker 3: that for surgeries and stuff. Yeah, but beyond that, I
Speaker 3: don't think they're like, hey, would you like us to
Speaker 3: change everything that we do here?
Speaker 2: Well, and I don't know for sure, but I wonder
Speaker 2: if maybe some of these animal based products were derived
Speaker 2: as latex alternatives in some cases, like you know, they
Speaker 2: needed a different stretchy thing so they started. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but it's not good if you have this all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, just like going to the doctor can become
Speaker 2: a sounds like.
Speaker 3: Going into leaving your bed or getting in bed is
Speaker 3: a problem. Yeah, this is a that's a truly I
Speaker 3: could see now why it's kind of worse and weirder. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of the other crazy things. This is
Speaker 2: a whole long aside. I ended up cutting it from
Speaker 2: the episode, but I want to mention it. The investigation
Speaker 2: into this allergic reaction to alpha gal touches on a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of other medical science, but the one of
Speaker 2: the ways that they figured out what was going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it must have been a tough nuts to crack.
Speaker 2: It was a tough nuts to crack is originally I
Speaker 2: don't even remember exactly how, but it was originally connected
Speaker 2: to like a cancer drug that accidentally introduced alpha gall
Speaker 2: into some people's systems and not led to a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of allergic reactions. But anyway, basically, the like Sherlock
Speaker 2: Holmes doc the doctor House who was investigating what was
Speaker 2: going on, got bit by a tick and developed alpha
Speaker 2: gala syndrome and that's how he figured it out.
Speaker 3: That's fucking that's astronauts situation where it's like we've talked
Speaker 3: about this on other times, where like the original Astronauts,
Speaker 3: the Mercury Savin or whatever they before they landed on
Speaker 3: these guys, they were gonna go like Hollywood stunt man, yeah,
Speaker 3: dared evils and like who would be crazy enough to
Speaker 3: strap themselves to a rocket? Yeah, And they found out
Speaker 3: pretty quickly it's no help to us if it's not
Speaker 3: an engineer or somebody out there.
Speaker 2: You can fix the rocket if something goes wrong with that.
Speaker 3: But just they can say, hey, this is what's happening
Speaker 3: and try and diagnose it in real time and have
Speaker 3: like a scientific method mind of for when you build
Speaker 3: the next one, I won't fall out if you do this,
Speaker 3: or maybe it's a thruster thing or blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: And so it's just interesting that, like it took a
Speaker 3: guy who has to know how to see a cause
Speaker 3: and effect to have been bitten by a tick and
Speaker 3: go wait a minut. That's the thing that was different. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and and like I don't know, just somebody who has
Speaker 3: the it bit the wrong person if it wanted to
Speaker 3: stay man. Yeah, someone who was equipped to be able
Speaker 3: to tell you what went wrong and here's how and
Speaker 3: diagnose what may have happened.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he still wasn't really able to stop it.
Speaker 3: Did he get the tick?
Speaker 2: I don't know if he got the tick, but he
Speaker 2: got the disease.
Speaker 3: It's like a spider man get bit and then if
Speaker 3: the spider died or it went away, you know what
Speaker 3: I mean, he doesn't have the spider anymore.
Speaker 2: I'm sure he doesn't because he got bit by the
Speaker 2: tick and then came down with the disease. But I'm
Speaker 2: sure by then the tick was long gone.
Speaker 3: Tick left.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because he wasn't. It's not like he was. He
Speaker 2: wasn't investigating ticks already. He just happened to, he put
Speaker 2: he was like, wait a second, this just happened. Wait,
Speaker 2: we should check to see what's going on with the ticks.
Speaker 3: And then that's yeah. I'm just saying that it would be.
Speaker 3: I'm sure when he told his friend about it, they're like,
Speaker 3: would you still have the tick? We can see if
Speaker 3: it's got all the task down, Yeah, and beat it
Speaker 3: out of it.
Speaker 2: With very small fists.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The last thing I want to flag about the Lone
Speaker 2: Star tick is where it's been showing up. We talked
Speaker 2: earlier about how it's been steadily spreading north out of
Speaker 2: Texas all the way up into Maine.
Speaker 3: Riding the rails.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hobo ticks, I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure hobos have
Speaker 2: had some crazy ticks too.
Speaker 3: I don't even want to It's the only thing that
Speaker 3: kills the tick community is a bit a hobo, and
Speaker 3: then it brings that back to its community of like
Speaker 3: it's got rail riding disease.
Speaker 2: I don't know the standard explanation for how it's spreading
Speaker 2: so far and wide is climate change, and that is
Speaker 2: almost certainly, probably definitely most of the story. But the
Speaker 2: lone star tick really did seem to start showing up
Speaker 2: in the Northeast in a hurry. And one of the
Speaker 2: places it landed earliest and most aggressively, Actuary City. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: not a sanctuary for ticks happens to be right across
Speaker 2: the water from a US government bio weapons lab. So
Speaker 2: buckle up, baby, because it is time for Chris's Spiracy Corner.
Speaker 2: So the town of Old Lime, Connecticut, where the original
Speaker 2: lime disease cluster popped up in the nineteen seventies, sits
Speaker 2: on Long Island Sound.
Speaker 3: Well did you when you stayed with my family?
Speaker 2: I did, And I didn't even realize until fairly recently
Speaker 2: in my life that that's what the Long Island Sound was,
Speaker 2: because they didn't grow up anywhere near it.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, when you look out, that's not the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 2: Right, it's the Long Island Sound is the body of
Speaker 2: water between Connecticut and the north shore of Long Island,
Speaker 2: and about nine miles offshore from Old Lime, almost in
Speaker 2: a directly straight line. Across the water, is a small
Speaker 2: piece of land called Plum Island. Now Plumb Island has
Speaker 2: lots of conspiracy theories floating around it, some of which
Speaker 2: helped inspire stranger things, some of which I'm sure have
Speaker 2: helped inspire heinous acts individuals who believe that they are
Speaker 2: stopping a government conspiracy. But Plum Island in reality has
Speaker 2: been home since the nineteen fifties to the Plum Island
Speaker 2: Animal Disease Center, which on paper is a USDA facility
Speaker 2: that researches foreign animal diseases like foot and mouth disease
Speaker 2: and African swine fever. Off paper, according to a lot
Speaker 2: of different investigative journalists, declassified documents, and the like, it
Speaker 2: has also been home to a story that the federal
Speaker 2: government would prefer you didn't poke too hard at. And
Speaker 2: that story, of course, starts with the Nazi. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, an attorney named Michael Christopher Carroll, not
Speaker 2: the Nazi, just to be clear, published a book called
Speaker 2: Lab two fifty seven, The Disturbing Story of the Government's
Speaker 2: Secret Germ Laboratory German Laboratory. Germ Laboratory also may have
Speaker 2: had a German involved. This book was a big deal.
Speaker 2: It was a New York Times bestseller Today's Show Book
Speaker 2: Club pick. It spent years on the radar. Carol had
Speaker 2: spent the better part of a decade going through a
Speaker 2: bunch of declassified documents in the National Archives. And the
Speaker 2: picture that he assembled is one of those things that
Speaker 2: it's well researched and it kind of feels like history,
Speaker 2: but it also has got a touch conspiracy to it. Okay,
Speaker 2: according to Carol, and a and a CounterPunch piece by
Speaker 2: this guy, Carl Grossman that kind of summarizes Carol's findings.
Speaker 2: Here's basically what happened after World War two ended. As
Speaker 2: we've discussed before, up paper Clip. Operation paper Clip was
Speaker 2: a government classified intelligence program that brought valuable or scientists
Speaker 2: that they considered valuable from Nazi Germany to America.
Speaker 3: Not just America, I think a couple of the Allied nations.
Speaker 2: Well, and a lot of it was inspired by a race.
Speaker 2: They knew that if we didn't grab them, the Soviets
Speaker 2: were going to grab them. Even though the Soviets also
Speaker 2: hated the Nazis, they wanted to pull the as much
Speaker 2: of the brain power that worked against them.
Speaker 3: I just needed people. They lost like twenty five million
Speaker 3: people world War two They didn't even ask if you
Speaker 3: were a scientist.
Speaker 2: They were like, hey, the doors open, Yeah, my back
Speaker 2: is turned. You do what you want, you fly the
Speaker 2: Russian flag man, no questions asked. But anyway, Yes, there
Speaker 2: was a competition basically to get the best of the
Speaker 2: brightest from Nazi Germany, which is the horrible thing to say,
Speaker 2: but it did happen, and we brought hundreds of former
Speaker 2: Nazis into the country. Their backgrounds were laundered, they were
Speaker 2: given research positions inside the government and in the military.
Speaker 2: Werner von Braun is the most famous of these.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's on TV with Walt Disney doing like teach
Speaker 3: kids about rockets and sciences.
Speaker 2: Yes, he ended up running the Apollo program. Yeah, for NASA,
Speaker 2: very well a Nazi. Well you're aware. I don't know
Speaker 2: if he's aware there's someone else listening to this conversation podcast.
Speaker 3: I never remember. He's also in the first season of
Speaker 3: For All Mankind, which is a little little guilty pleasure show.
Speaker 2: I like, yeah, but our subject is not Werner von Braun.
Speaker 2: Our subject. The relevant paper clip recruit for this story
Speaker 2: is a guy named Eric Traub. During the war, Troub
Speaker 2: had been the lab chief of a Nazi bio weapons
Speaker 2: facility called in cell Reams, which just sounds evil.
Speaker 4: Well, now, well that's taken on new meanings.
Speaker 2: It sat on a little crescent shaped island in the
Speaker 2: Baltic Sea, and he reported directly to Heinrich Himmler. His
Speaker 2: specialty was developing bioweapons that you could deploy against livestock.
Speaker 2: The theory the Nazis had was that they wanted to
Speaker 2: try to wipe out the Soviet unions cattle and reindeer
Speaker 2: herds and starve swaths of the country without actually having
Speaker 2: to go fight them.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite jokes in Mitchell and Webb in
Speaker 3: the sketch where they're like where they play Nazis and
Speaker 3: they're like.
Speaker 2: Are we the baddies?
Speaker 3: Are we the baddies because the designed the uniforms. But
Speaker 3: one of my favorite jokes in that is, like, there
Speaker 3: was anything I learned in the last thousand miles of
Speaker 3: retreat is that Russia's in dire need of mechanized farming.
Speaker 3: Like they burned everything, yeah, or whatever whatever the hell
Speaker 3: they had done, they destroyed all the crops.
Speaker 2: Well, Eric Traumb, who was studying how to wipe out
Speaker 2: these cattle and reindeer herds was specifically researching disease carrying
Speaker 2: insects with a a particular interest and text tics. Operation
Speaker 2: paper Clip brought Traub into the US in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: nine and set him up at Fort Dietrich and Maryland,
Speaker 2: which also has a whole host of occult spooky connections.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what do you think that conversation with him is?
Speaker 3: It was like, listen, how would you lights come to
Speaker 3: America's Like is this a trick? And it was like, no,
Speaker 3: your tick work speaks for you. Like who even knew, Hey,
Speaker 3: this is a guy other than I guess it would
Speaker 3: just be the Nazi high command where it would be like, well,
Speaker 3: if Hemmler or whatever his fucking dave is yea, if
Speaker 3: like Himmler trusted him, then he must be somebody. But
Speaker 3: if they gave him money or like and we knew
Speaker 3: von Brahm was making like the V two rocket or whatever, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know at what point, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I just don't know what tick Head was like, we
Speaker 3: gotta snatch this dude. You can't let the Soviets get
Speaker 3: the tick guy.
Speaker 2: Well, I would imagine that some American scientists were probably
Speaker 2: been working on a similar thing at some point, like
Speaker 2: understood the power of ticks to potentially spread disease, you know,
Speaker 2: and misery, and you know, whether they were working on
Speaker 2: this exact project already and went get me that guy,
Speaker 2: or if just somebody had never had the evil plan
Speaker 2: to try it, or never had the the had had
Speaker 2: the plan but had not tried it, they will, well
Speaker 2: he'll do it, you know, like get him over here.
Speaker 2: He clearly doesn't have an issue with this anyway. Whyever,
Speaker 2: for whatever reason that they settled on this guy, they
Speaker 2: set him up in forty Trick At the time, that
Speaker 2: was the Army's primary biological warfare research site.
Speaker 3: Probably World War two, there was already like mustard gas
Speaker 3: is illegal and shit, right, like yeah, there were already
Speaker 3: like rules of engagement and like war stuff that chemical
Speaker 3: warfare was off the table. Yet every country here is
Speaker 3: actively pursuing it at the time, oh for sure.
Speaker 2: And to be to be totally honest, like I have
Speaker 2: no idea what was outlawed when And like you know,
Speaker 2: mustard gas is a bioweapon, but it's not germ warfare.
Speaker 2: And no, I don't know if germ warfare was also
Speaker 2: made Like I don't. Also, these motherfuckers didn't care and
Speaker 2: not you know, like they're just inventing things.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying that there was like it seemed like
Speaker 3: a bunch of people guys together after the first one.
Speaker 3: I was like, let's just agree to not do that again. Huh. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was coming back like that's we can all agree
Speaker 3: that that sucked. Yea, And I think enough people were like,
Speaker 3: you're right, like Geneva convention type shit, They're yeah, you're right,
Speaker 3: we won't do that. A guy in a lab being like,
Speaker 3: what if I put this on a tick and then
Speaker 3: I put a tick in the cheese they eat, It's like, buddy,
Speaker 3: calm down right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess you know, to TRB, starving millions of
Speaker 2: people didn't seem maybe as bad as mustard gas attacks.
Speaker 2: But yeah, see, at the end of the day, it's
Speaker 2: all pretty awful.
Speaker 3: The Germans did poison a bunch of food. I think though,
Speaker 3: like when they would leave an area or on retreat
Speaker 3: or what have you. I think they did like set
Speaker 3: up tables for the Soviet soldiers to find. That's like, oh,
Speaker 3: that looks like really good food and stuff. That's like
Speaker 3: because a lot of people in these towns or whatever
Speaker 3: were fucking starving anyway because of all the shit going on,
Speaker 3: and it would just like all the food be poisoned.
Speaker 3: That's that's I mean, when they're still finding booby traps
Speaker 3: right like in London and shit.
Speaker 2: Know what they say, don't put it past the Nazi.
Speaker 3: Don't put it past the Nazi, and.
Speaker 2: They certainly tried everything.
Speaker 3: I feel like it's the year twenty twenty four and
Speaker 3: I'm still reading at that time, like like two years ago.
Speaker 3: I feel like there's another like old woman opens cabinet
Speaker 3: to find like Nazi booby trapped bomb.
Speaker 2: I don't know about booby traps, but I know, I mean,
Speaker 2: they do still find unexploded bombs and stuff from World
Speaker 2: War Two all over the place. But in any case, Traub,
Speaker 2: who was brought initially to Fort Dietrich, became one of
Speaker 2: the central figures in the establishment of a similar facility
Speaker 2: on Plumb Island in the early nineteen fifties, and everybody
Speaker 2: knew it was up. There was an anonymous source who
Speaker 2: told Carol they called him the Nazi Scientist.
Speaker 3: So there are fucking people living in free houses at
Speaker 3: this point because they fought in the war.
Speaker 2: And across the sound there's a Nazi building a bug facility.
Speaker 3: But even working it was very fresh in the minds
Speaker 3: of people who had no help with PTSD, Like, I
Speaker 3: can't imagine even working in that facility that he There
Speaker 3: must have been some people who were fucking pissed he
Speaker 3: was there. I'm regardless of what he's doing there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: even if he's just collecting dad or whatever on dandelions,
Speaker 3: people would be like, what the fuck is this guy that,
Speaker 3: like all my buddies died fighting doing here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's Troub. Troub was a Nazi who was
Speaker 2: brought over to be a bioweapons specialist with a specialty
Speaker 2: in tics, and he established Plumb Island in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: What makes all this a little crazier is that this
Speaker 2: guy Carol wasn't the first person to write about any
Speaker 2: of this. In nineteen eighty two, which was like twenty
Speaker 2: something years before Carrol's book came out, an attorney named
Speaker 2: John Loftis published a book called The Belarus Secret. At
Speaker 2: the time, Loftis was working for the US Department of
Speaker 2: Justice Office of Special Investigations, which was the official unit
Speaker 2: to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals who'd ended up
Speaker 2: living in America. So this guy wasn't like a lunatic
Speaker 2: connecting dots on a map. He was a literal Nazi
Speaker 2: hunter for the US government. In his nineteen eighty two book,
Speaker 2: Loftus wrote that he had received information, presumably through his
Speaker 2: work at the Department of Justice, that the US had
Speaker 2: tested poison tics on the Plumb Island artillery range in
Speaker 2: the early nineteen fifties. He also noted, almost in passing,
Speaker 2: that most of the records of that testing had been destroyed.
Speaker 3: I bet.
Speaker 2: So we have these two attorneys, basically separated by more
Speaker 2: than twenty years, coming from different angles, with different source materials,
Speaker 2: both reaching the same conclusion that Plumb Island had dangerous ticks,
Speaker 2: the ticks had pathogens, and some of them probably got out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, yeah, we did our best to have it
Speaker 3: be an island. But yeah, what was the what was
Speaker 3: that book that we both liked by Tom whatever?
Speaker 2: About like the Oh Chaos by yeah, by Tom I
Speaker 2: forget his last name, Yeah, but Maut the Banson's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Manson like as being like an ass in
Speaker 3: a government asset. Basically, yeah, there's enough in that book too,
Speaker 3: where you're like, oh, shit, it's like doesn't feel as
Speaker 3: conspiracatorial when enough of the paperwork is declassified or there
Speaker 3: or so clearly these connections can be made. Yeah. And
Speaker 3: then also with that, I think there was a bunch
Speaker 3: of shit in that, and maybe in the Montauk Project whatever,
Speaker 3: hell we talked about mk Ultra and shit, yeah, where
Speaker 3: it's like, oh, they destroyed all the documents, but they
Speaker 3: didn't destroy the receipts for buying the stuff or whatever,
Speaker 3: so you're still able to connect that there was clearly Yeah, they.
Speaker 2: Were well an mk ult they literally just forgot to
Speaker 2: just somehow some of the boxes just did not get destroyed.
Speaker 2: So somebody, I don't he wasn't like literally cleaning out
Speaker 2: a closet, but they basically clean out of the clouset.
Speaker 3: Were like, what's this I'm saying so things like this too.
Speaker 3: Was like no, yeah, like it's in spiritorial. But they're
Speaker 3: also like, we have the receipts literally, yeah, that they
Speaker 3: were doing shit a plumb Island. They like, nobody needs
Speaker 3: to order that many ticks.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the world's number one Nazi tic doctor ordered a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of ticks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the thing is about like putting it on
Speaker 3: the artillery range or the hell you had said, is
Speaker 3: it trying to like see if if it bites.
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly what they were doing, because that's.
Speaker 3: Like the DuPont thing where they made like nonstick bullets. No,
Speaker 3: well so DuPont, who makes like paint vainly they do
Speaker 3: a million things. Yeah, they like nonstick pans we use.
Speaker 3: I think that was like originally on tanks to keep
Speaker 3: like water off the treads or so. It was some
Speaker 3: shit where like the way that like when you put
Speaker 3: something in there, like it beads and rolls around, it doesn't.
Speaker 3: So anyway, that Forever Chemical was originally had war applications,
Speaker 3: and they found out that you can make fucking eggs
Speaker 3: without having them stick. They put the material into cigarettes.
Speaker 3: They were like, this ship might be cancerous, you know,
Speaker 3: like we should check. So the way they'd checked was
Speaker 3: they put like a little bit of the material in cigarettes,
Speaker 3: then gave the cigarettes out for free at the factory floor.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, and then everybody who fucking.
Speaker 2: Worked there they like died of cancer.
Speaker 3: Well they were like what they get lung cancer? Like
Speaker 3: their hair fell like radium girls like it was not
Speaker 3: and then the same thing, they were like, just bury
Speaker 3: it to destroy the documents, but didn't destroy enough so
Speaker 3: when they were beingsued a bunch. I think there's a
Speaker 3: movie about it. It's really fucking sad. It's a narrative film,
Speaker 3: so I'm sure there's a lot of it's not a documentary, right,
Speaker 3: so I'm sure there's a lot of artistic license. But
Speaker 3: it's called dark Waters. I think Dark Water with uh
Speaker 3: Mark Ruffalo, and it's really an incredibly depressic movie about
Speaker 3: how like DuPont just paid people off.
Speaker 2: Well, dark Water is about a chemical company poisoning an
Speaker 2: entire town, but it's not through cigarettes.
Speaker 3: No, it's dust your runoff.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: But I believe it's either the actual story there's based
Speaker 3: on the actual story that I'm talking about, or it
Speaker 3: actually is they're talking about the actual story I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: But part of the court case as to you knew
Speaker 3: what you were doing was that they did this test
Speaker 3: with cigarettes.
Speaker 2: Oh I see, I see, and.
Speaker 3: Then still went on to make a billion dollars a
Speaker 3: year in pans, right, But like so they were like
Speaker 3: not only because they're like, we didn't even know that
Speaker 3: that could make your cow woll fucked up and it
Speaker 3: was like you did your own in house study. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but yeah, that was wild shit man.
Speaker 2: So now I want to bring back a name from
Speaker 2: earlier in the episode. I told you we would come
Speaker 2: back to Willie Bergdorfer. Bergdorfer, to recap, is the Swiss
Speaker 2: trained medical entomologist who in nineteen eighty one identified the
Speaker 2: bacterium that causes lime disease and got the bacterium named
Speaker 2: after him in nineteen eighty three. What I didn't get
Speaker 2: into is that Bergdorfer didn't arrive at that discovery from nowhere.
Speaker 2: For the previous several decades, he'd been working at Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, doing classified research for the
Speaker 2: US Biological Weapons Program, and the specific research he was
Speaker 2: doing year in and year out for most of his
Speaker 2: career was injecting pathogens into ticks. His own paper, published
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty two, describes the deliberate infection of ticks
Speaker 2: with diseases as part of his work.
Speaker 3: That is fucking crazy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like that is it is a little knee or
Speaker 6: does he like put it in some some some like
Speaker 6: does he put he must put the disease in like
Speaker 6: a bunny and then put the ticks on the bunny
Speaker 6: to suck the blood.
Speaker 3: But either way, if you got a sick bunny that
Speaker 3: you filled with lime disease, that's one thing, Yeah, But
Speaker 3: to have to fill it into something that you can
Speaker 3: so easily lose, yeah, in a second, Like I looked
Speaker 3: one way, I looked back, that tick was gone. Right.
Speaker 3: There's not enough doors you can like close, in my opinion,
Speaker 3: to feel safe with doing that. No.
Speaker 2: And according to Chris Nuby, who is a Stanford science
Speaker 2: writer who's done some of the most rigorous modern reporting
Speaker 2: on all of this, Bergdorffer spent all these two decades
Speaker 2: inside the bioweapons program.
Speaker 3: Looking for the tickie loss.
Speaker 2: Yeah, down on his hands and he's going, oh god,
Speaker 2: oh god, o god, I's done. No he he uh.
Speaker 2: He grew microbes. This is this is actually how they
Speaker 2: did it. He grew microbes inside of ticks and then
Speaker 2: fed the tick.
Speaker 3: All no, wow, go ahead.
Speaker 2: He through the microbes inside the ticks, fed the ticks
Speaker 2: to lab animals, and then harvested the results to determine
Speaker 2: which combinations of tick and pathogen produced the kinds of illnesses.
Speaker 2: The military wanted to be able to deploy.
Speaker 3: Everyone involved in this should be in prison, and if
Speaker 3: I see one of them in heaven, I'll be pizzed.
Speaker 3: These are people who went and decided this is what
Speaker 3: I'm gonna do and took a harder path at it too.
Speaker 3: I really think just gotta be easier to put things
Speaker 3: in a bigger animal, right.
Speaker 2: You would imagine, But I guess he was trying to
Speaker 2: grow new kinds of diseases.
Speaker 3: So, but the idea that he's or anyone is gonna
Speaker 3: wake up in the morning and be like, gotta go
Speaker 3: disease a tick this morning, then I gotta not only like,
Speaker 3: let a tick be a tick, which is, hey, man,
Speaker 3: I can't help it if the tick wants to bite
Speaker 3: this rabbit, but no o, they're force feeding animals ticks.
Speaker 3: Hey eat this bug? Is crazy? Yeah, and then be
Speaker 3: like what happened to the rabbit? And it was like, oh,
Speaker 3: the rabbit's whole head exploded, and then the US government
Speaker 3: being like, no, the ideal thing for us is if
Speaker 3: their eyebrows fall off so that we embarrassed their army. Yes,
Speaker 3: too many questions will come from heads exploding. And so
Speaker 3: he was like, all right, gotta put a different fucking
Speaker 3: disease in this tick and see if the eyebrows fall off.
Speaker 3: Like the idea that someone's doing it is awful and
Speaker 3: he should be in hell. The idea that someone is
Speaker 3: looking over their work to be like, we actually have
Speaker 3: fucked up goals in mind for this also should be
Speaker 3: in hell.
Speaker 2: Yes, Nixon officially shut down the US offensive bioweapons program
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty nine, but a number of the TICK.
Speaker 3: Programs at a public announcement or he did it. It's
Speaker 3: like quietly in the background the army stopped doing it.
Speaker 2: I don't know, but it was officially just.
Speaker 3: As a man who was I have a lot of
Speaker 3: controversy in his presidency.
Speaker 2: He did, and so.
Speaker 3: I imagine it could also be like, hey, bring our
Speaker 3: boys home, and he's like, I shut down a TICK
Speaker 3: thing today. Well, I'm the good guy.
Speaker 2: He shut it down. But it was already too late,
Speaker 2: because we.
Speaker 3: Know that most things TICK related.
Speaker 2: Late, and we know that at least two of the
Speaker 2: TICK programs had already left the lab on purpose in
Speaker 2: one form or another. After the Bay of Pigs, the
Speaker 2: United States dropped disease ticks on Cuba as part of
Speaker 2: Operation mongoose. This has been verified through multiple sources, including
Speaker 2: declassified JFK files and quotes from a CIA officer involved
Speaker 2: at the time. The goal of the drop was to
Speaker 2: make Cuban agricultural workers sick enough to disrupt the sugarcane harvest.
Speaker 2: And there was also a separate Army funded project around
Speaker 2: the same period, which is even crazier, in which researchers
Speaker 2: released hundreds of thousands of radioactive ticks along the Atlantic
Speaker 2: Bird Flyway near Norfolk, Virginia. They'd made them radioactive.
Speaker 3: So you can find them again. Yes, that's about to say, like,
Speaker 3: at least you can isolate an isotope. That's what my
Speaker 3: mind immediately went to that.
Speaker 2: Yes, it wasn't to create a bunch of radio or
Speaker 2: radiated super soldiers or formed from birds or whatever. They
Speaker 2: wanted to track them with Geiger counters once they spread.
Speaker 3: I feel like a genius for knowing that.
Speaker 2: The whole point of the experiment was to study how
Speaker 2: far ticks would migrate when they hitch rides on migratory birds. Yeah,
Speaker 2: just want to point out these birds were migrating north.
Speaker 2: A lot of these ticks over the years migrating pretty
Speaker 2: far north.
Speaker 3: I will say. I mean, the more you hear about
Speaker 3: this stuff us doing this show, or shows that do
Speaker 3: a lot more conspiracy heavy shit than we'll ever do,
Speaker 3: the more you must just be like everything's I wouldn't
Speaker 3: take the vaccine either, But you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: if like I had two hundred and sixty episodes of
Speaker 3: this type of shit, not on our show, but other
Speaker 3: types of shows, well, I'd also be like, I'm not
Speaker 3: putting anything in my body the government tells me to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think you can. There's a big
Speaker 2: difference between being able to draw connections between things and
Speaker 2: be able to prove something in a way that should
Speaker 2: affect the way that you live your life. And you know,
Speaker 2: I think it's really important to be able to look
Speaker 2: at things and go huh without going, well, fuck it,
Speaker 2: I'm not taking any vaccines. I'm not because you can
Speaker 2: make almost anything rhyme, like all these science instead of
Speaker 2: gone missing. There's some weird coincidences in there. There's some
Speaker 2: disappearances that seem a little odd, desks that seem spooky,
Speaker 2: but nothing that really is a defensible, provable pattern of
Speaker 2: operation of any kind, or at least not a pattern
Speaker 2: that I think you wouldn't find if you just surveyed.
Speaker 2: You know, let's say one hundred thousand scientists work for
Speaker 2: the government, Okay, thirty of them have had weird deaths
Speaker 2: and gone missing. If you just looked at one hundred
Speaker 2: thousand science teachers, you probably could find thirty who had
Speaker 2: weird desks or went missing or you know, went on
Speaker 2: a hike and died. And that doesn't mean that those
Speaker 2: science teachers were being killed as part of our government program. Okay,
Speaker 2: But anyway, the results.
Speaker 3: Looked in some way works for the fucking scientists. All
Speaker 3: That's the last.
Speaker 2: Thing I need is that people started saying that our
Speaker 2: show is like a psyop, like an anti to cover
Speaker 2: up the conspiracy.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that's what I'm saying, said said, like a
Speaker 3: guy who's been paid to cover up the conspiracies. The
Speaker 3: results go to an ad break. It was like, Hi,
Speaker 3: do you love science in the US government.
Speaker 2: The result of a lot of this is Chris Nuby,
Speaker 2: who we just mentioned, science writer at Stanford. She'd contracted
Speaker 2: lyme herself on Martha's Vineyard in two thousand and two.
Speaker 2: It took years and so many doctors to get the
Speaker 2: right diagnosis, and she got very deep into the chronic
Speaker 2: lime community. She produced a documentary in twenty fourteen called
Speaker 2: Under Our Skin about people suffering from chronic lime. So
Speaker 2: she spent from twenty fourteen to twenty nineteen researching and
Speaker 2: writing a book called Bitten, The Secret History of Lime
Speaker 2: Disease and Biological Weapons, and it is a pretty well
Speaker 2: crafted piece of journalism. Now, Nuby has been in the
Speaker 2: presence of people with broader, weirder conspiracy theories, but the
Speaker 2: theories that she puts forward are you know, her name
Speaker 2: I think has been a little bit unfairly sullied because
Speaker 2: I think her theory of the case is less wild
Speaker 2: than what people have made it out to be on
Speaker 2: the internet. She does not claim that lime disease itself
Speaker 2: was created in the lab. We know that it was
Speaker 2: detected in Utsy. We know that these museum tic specimens
Speaker 2: have it like ninety million years ago.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, that's true. That's that's definitive. What she does
Speaker 3: argue is that a cluster little jetpacks was made ling
Speaker 3: Hitler Zoom through the Americans, guys, yeah, in their tick zeppelins.
Speaker 2: She argues that there's this cluster of three unusual tick
Speaker 2: born diseases that suddenly emerged around Long Island Sounds starting
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3: So she doesn't think that those three ticks were represented
Speaker 3: in that painting of that dog's ear.
Speaker 2: No, although that would be an incredible that's like a
Speaker 2: Dan Brown level, like a er tick from the Hyena
Speaker 2: years exactly.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: She points out that within a fifty mile radius, all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, around nineteen sixty eight, you start having
Speaker 2: cases of limarthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted feed of her and
Speaker 2: babe ciosis.
Speaker 3: Can I throw something out here? Yes, when were we
Speaker 3: using agent orange in Vietnam?
Speaker 2: That would have been probably around the same time, is.
Speaker 3: What I'm thinking. Is it like, are people coming back
Speaker 3: and complaining about symptoms of that? So I think there
Speaker 3: was joint stuff related to that and all sorts of
Speaker 3: dizzyness and weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Is it like agent orange fucked people up?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So I'm saying, is it people which was also
Speaker 3: we did that because it war? Right? I don't know
Speaker 3: who that air quotes, it was definitely war. I'm saying
Speaker 3: like that was a a some sort of chemical warfare.
Speaker 3: So I'm saying, is there any overlap for does that
Speaker 3: come up at all in the book.
Speaker 2: No, not that specifically, but I'm sure you could find
Speaker 2: overlap between agent orange conspiracies and tick conspiracies. Her point
Speaker 2: is that the fact that all three of these sprung
Speaker 2: up within about a fifty mile radius around the same time,
Speaker 2: very near a facility that was publicly known to be
Speaker 2: experimenting with diseases on tics. Her quote is, I have
Speaker 2: no proof that line disease is a bioweapon, but I
Speaker 2: know they weaponized other tick born diseases. There were unsafe
Speaker 2: experiments with ticks and tickborn diseases, and that was fuel
Speaker 2: on the fire of this epidemic. Of course, I think
Speaker 2: we'll end this episode with everybody saying that I work
Speaker 2: for the CIA and I'm covering this up by pointing
Speaker 2: out the credential. Scientists push back hard on the lab
Speaker 2: leak theory of lyme disease. A twenty seventeen Stand for
Speaker 2: Genomics study found that Brellia burgdor Ferries DNA diversity is ancient,
Speaker 2: with lineages that diverged tens of thousands of years ago,
Speaker 2: distributed across the entire Northeast and Midwest in patterns that
Speaker 2: don't really fit a recent you know, point release like
Speaker 2: a source of a single lab.
Speaker 3: Okay, so if you if you found t rex lips
Speaker 3: in Amber, uh huh, and then you pulled from these two.
Speaker 2: First i'd asked why the t rex was kissing a
Speaker 2: tree famously not known to love trees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but there was I think probably lonelyest epidemic then too.
Speaker 3: And so if you find these lips and then inside
Speaker 3: of them you found COVID, uh huh, there goes that
Speaker 3: lab league argument as well.
Speaker 2: Well, I think the difference is that you can cause
Speaker 2: an uptick in diseases. I think that's a little bit
Speaker 2: different because COVID is a more recent disease.
Speaker 3: Only because we haven't found in Ambry yet. Well, that's
Speaker 3: what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: But you can whether whether the disease has existed for
Speaker 2: millions of years or not. There is an argument to
Speaker 2: be made that if you all of a sudden start
Speaker 2: seeing a high percentage of cases around a lab known
Speaker 2: to be experimenting with that disease, it's not unreasonable to
Speaker 2: think that perhaps that disease has.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I didn't say it was unreasonable, and that
Speaker 3: is where I think it came from. Yeah, No, I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm just saying It's just it's the only other lab
Speaker 3: link outside of science fiction work I can think of.
Speaker 3: It's why I made that correlation, like you talking about
Speaker 3: this lab link is the only other lab liak I've
Speaker 3: ever heard of that wasn't like COVID. No, I meant
Speaker 3: that wasn't like there's the COVID lablink theory. Then the
Speaker 3: one you just told me right now, Yeah, is the
Speaker 3: first time I've ever thought of another lab leak that
Speaker 3: wasn't like the stand or something.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3: Or it's a work of fiction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But anyway, The science pushback on this is there's
Speaker 2: lots of different, slightly different genetic lineages of lime disease
Speaker 2: that are all distributed all around the country and the
Speaker 2: planet in ways that don't line up with the idea
Speaker 2: that there was really a sudden spike that could be
Speaker 2: attributed to a particular lab.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the one that when you zoom in or
Speaker 3: a microscope has a barcode for the United States Air
Speaker 3: Force or something there that might be the one we
Speaker 3: did in the lab.
Speaker 2: The scientific argument is that the explosion of American lime
Speaker 2: cases over the past forty years is much better explained
Speaker 2: by ecological factors like suburban sprawl pushing humans further into
Speaker 2: deer habitats, populations of deer and whitefooted mice that went
Speaker 2: through the roof decades of reforestation. All of these things
Speaker 2: create ideal conditions for tick populations to thrive and expand
Speaker 2: without any lab interference in the way that they found
Speaker 2: all these cases. I also think there's something to be
Speaker 2: said for the fact that, yes, we only discovered lime
Speaker 2: disease officially in the nineteen seventies. I this wasn't part
Speaker 2: of my research. I imagine it's probably kind of difficult
Speaker 2: to try to go back and figure out what rates
Speaker 2: of cases would have been before we officially discovered instide,
Speaker 2: we didn't have the data set. And it's and it's
Speaker 2: while it's a bad disease, the symptoms aren't. It's not
Speaker 2: like a Bola, where it's like, well, let's look for
Speaker 2: cases of people's vomiting blood back. It is a bola
Speaker 2: is bad back, big bad way. But you know, joint aches, nausea,
Speaker 2: like these are things that lots of other diseases cause
Speaker 2: a lot of overlap. Yeah, so if you tried to
Speaker 2: look back through the record and go, well, what was
Speaker 2: lyme and what was something else? You could never really
Speaker 2: say for sure. So all we know is that, yes,
Speaker 2: around late sixties, early seventies we started seeing these waves
Speaker 2: of cases. That's also around the time we defined what
Speaker 2: it was. So you know, I think it's I think
Speaker 2: the research here is I think similarly well documented in
Speaker 2: the way that chaos is where you go something something
Speaker 2: was going on.
Speaker 3: I mean, you you if there's any hint of truth,
Speaker 3: and it sounds like it's one hundred percent true that
Speaker 3: we had people saying good morning, al or whatever and
Speaker 3: walking into a facility where they put viruses and ticks
Speaker 3: and fed them to fucking animals with a with a
Speaker 3: goal to deploy these ticks on the battlefield. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: all I need to hear.
Speaker 2: Yeahs In eds In not into doing it.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying that, like, yeah, I mean it could
Speaker 3: very well if some element of this shit, I could
Speaker 3: see how people can get wrapped up and like, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: this was not nature that did this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, look, guys, that was everything you ever need
Speaker 2: to know about ticks by Chris and ed our book report.
Speaker 3: We didn't even mention the superhero once.
Speaker 2: We didn't even mention that tick this. I fell asleep
Speaker 2: last night trying to remember that. I wanted to bring
Speaker 2: up tick the Superhero the cartoon show, the live action show,
Speaker 2: didn't even mention it on comic book. The comic book.
Speaker 2: But that's okay. I think we've talked enough about ticks.
Speaker 3: Speaking of comics. I was just thinking about comics because
Speaker 3: you were like, oh, this explosion came around the same that,
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, we were looking for it every
Speaker 3: couple years in the comic community. It's like, oh, this
Speaker 3: book was super rare. There's like four on the census,
Speaker 3: and it was like, you know, it's worth five hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars. And then word gets out that a new
Speaker 3: record sold for five hundred thousand dollars. All of a sudden,
Speaker 3: there's like thirteen more that show up in the fucking census.
Speaker 3: Everyone sees it's worth money. Oh I actually I do
Speaker 3: have one of those. My grandpa did have Superman three
Speaker 3: or whatever. I just chose to random ass it's worth
Speaker 3: anything I'm saying, but like, it's just one of those
Speaker 3: things where now everyone's looking it's popular. Turns out there
Speaker 3: are more first eppearance of fucking Superman's out there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and now you can find out there's money to be
Speaker 3: made in it. They're showing up. Yeah, and so same
Speaker 3: thing with you said, like now that everyone's looking, now
Speaker 3: that's top of mind. Oh my god, tick six ticks.
Speaker 2: So we segued right from Chris's conspiracy corner to Ed's
Speaker 2: comics corner, and now we will end this episode with
Speaker 2: the fear tier, Ed, where do you place ticks on
Speaker 2: your fear tier this summer?
Speaker 3: It's a six. I feel like I'm doing eight a lot,
Speaker 3: and it's a six. I don't know. We didn't look
Speaker 3: at the numbers for California tick wise.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: I think we are in a pretty good situation. Bad
Speaker 3: air quality, wildfires once again happening, but not a lot
Speaker 3: of mosquitos, Like we rarely deal with mosquitos. Here, you
Speaker 3: got mosquito bites. But I'm saying, not a lot of mosquitoes,
Speaker 3: not a lot of ticks stuff, not a lot of
Speaker 3: crazy spiders.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but we we have forty different species of ticks
Speaker 2: in California, making it it's one of the most tick
Speaker 2: diverse states in the country. Giant piece of land, and
Speaker 2: the western black legged tick is the primary carrier of
Speaker 2: lime disease in California, found mostly in cool, moist, wooded areas.
Speaker 3: I'm not going there. I'm not going to end or
Speaker 3: and so I'm saying is like where we live in
Speaker 3: southern California. It's not I don't think I'll run into
Speaker 3: too many ticks here. Yeah, run into more tick cosplayers.
Speaker 2: I will put ticks at a four.
Speaker 3: I only went six this. Once they get you, you're
Speaker 3: going to be allergic or dead.
Speaker 2: So not necessarily, I don't want to over freak people out,
Speaker 2: but yeah, check for ticks. This make sure consider this
Speaker 2: our our PSA, our public service announcement. This is our
Speaker 2: At the end of our Gi Joe episode here, we're
Speaker 2: going to turn to the camera and say, hey, kids,
Speaker 2: check your legs for ticks when you come in from outside.
Speaker 2: Check your clothing, check your arms, check your scalp, check
Speaker 2: your butt. That's where I found mine. Make sure that
Speaker 2: you don't have any ticks digging in. They do spread disease.
Speaker 2: They are very dangerous, and we love you here. It's
Speaker 2: scared all the time. We don't want anybody getting sick
Speaker 2: from a tick.
Speaker 3: So we'll move to the city, become broke. But you're
Speaker 3: not gonna probably get bit by a tick. That's true
Speaker 3: as much once I left rural looking to my family
Speaker 3: lives by the water. Now we're saying once I left
Speaker 3: more rural inland Connecticut.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't really run into ticks that much. No,
Speaker 2: a lot of city people don't. And even if you're
Speaker 2: out in the country, you know to wear long pants,
Speaker 2: you know, to wear long socks, you check, you're gonna
Speaker 2: be fine. I think ticks are a solid for And
Speaker 2: with that, it's the end of the episode, guys. So
Speaker 2: until next time, I'm Chris Glari and I'm Ed and
Speaker 2: the show is Scared All the Time. We will see
Speaker 2: you soon. Bye bye.
Speaker 3: Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Klari
Speaker 3: and Edvacola.
Speaker 2: Written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola. Additional support and
Speaker 2: Keeper of Sanity is test Fightful.
Speaker 3: Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual ste.
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