J ames H. Oliver is a well-known expert in ticks and their pathogens. He is a Professor of Biology Emeritus at Georgia Southern University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the 1950s, he served in the army at Ft. Dietrich, Maryland, a top-secret biological warfare facility, where he studied ticks and the diseases they carry.
In a recent interview in American Entomologist, “Ticks, Lyme Disease, and a Golden Gloves Champion,” Oliver opens up about ticks and army experiments during the 1950s. Unfortunately, the article is not open-access, meaning that you have to pay to read it. (However, your local librarian may be able to get it for you.)
The interview suggests to me that the reason we have such a large problem with our tick population today may be related to military experiments in the 50s. They were part of a biological warfare effort against the Russians. One goal was to figure out how to get ticks to reproduce quickly and abundantly, as well as how to distribute ticks to targeted areas.
Whether the army ever distributed infected ticks, and, if so, whether this happened in the United States, remains unknown. However, even efforts to increase the tick population and its distribution would likely have increased disease risk as those ticks fed on local infected mice and other rodents…….. Join or login below to continue reading.
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