mpost said...
well 100 years ago you would bring 10 children to the world and 3 of them would die of all sorts of diseases while you would live up to around 50 ... life was CRUEL. Today we are living in a soft version of reality, where almost nobody around us dies till they are seniors...
in the distant past, disease awareness was ZERO, so nobody cared if lyme existed or not as there were other lethal things you could catch.
to answer more directly to your question, they found B Bugdorferi genome in the ticks preserved in amber, 15 million years ago ... so i think we can close the case about "biological warfare"
/www.livescience.com/46007-lyme-disease-ancient-amber-tick.html
people had this since before there were people, but nobody cared. bubonic plague is more lethal, that is something to care about. it's all about the context...
The issue with the article you linked is that they fail to source a study illustrating their claims, plus the author is an english and art major, not a scientist.
I understand that Borrelia Burgdorferi most likely existed well before its discovery in the 1970's, however I'm merely playing devils advocate here. I'm not asking if it existed prior to its discovery but if there's proof of genetic manipulation that can't account for the slow epidemiological and ecological changes.
I put dashes around what illustrates the lack of proof from this article.
The article you linked states:
The oldest known evidence of Lyme disease --may-- lie in ticks that were entombed in amber at least 15 million years ago, --scientists announced.--
(which scientists and why may have?)
The researchers investigated four fossilized ticks that had been trapped in chunks of amber found in the Dominican Republic. Inside the ticks' bodies, the scientists --saw-- a large population of cells --that looked like the squiggly shaped spirochete cells of the Borrelia genus-- a --type-- of bacteria that causes Lyme disease today.
(Using the words "may" and "looked like" isn't scientific and so this article never claims that the amber find is the earliest documented case of Lyme disease as there are hundreds of strains of borrelia which all look comparable.)
Now, the article does state that the "Iceman" Otzï is the earliest documented case of Lyme disease:
"Before he was frozen in the glacier, the iceman was probably already in misery from Lyme disease," Poinar said. "He had a lot of health problems and was really a mess."
However the only thing the author of this article and the majority of people remember from that iceman story was the catchy headline of "Lyme bacteria found in Iceman Mummy". While it did make for an interesting headline, it wasn't entirely true. If it was, it would prove the skeptics belief that Lyme existed prior to the 20th century. From the Nature study:
Within the Spirochaetes phylum, 45.7% of the reads (0.16% of the total bacterial hits) were assigned to sequences of the pathogen B. burgdorferi, which is known to cause Lyme disease in humans (Fig. 5). To confirm this result of the metagenomic approach, the entire number of reads was mapped against the B. burgdorferi reference genome and the strain-specific B. burgdorferi plasmids. One million sequence reads covered about
60% of the B. burgdorferi genome including a high representation of the bacterial episome, which was covered up to 67% at least once. While several reads were specific for Borrelia, the ***60% coverage still represents an upper boundary as reads may map to other species besides Borrelia.***
TLDR: The study did not find an exact genomic match for Borrelia burgdorferi, but matched only about
60% of the sequence. Whatever Spirochete was found and tested in the Iceman may be attributed to other species of bacteria.
And here's the follow up study.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3753567/
LMAT shows that among the reads assigned to the Borrelia genus, the majority of the ***reads are assigned to non–species-specific genomic regions with species-specific reads assigned to several Borrelia species, including B.burgdorferi, Borrelia garinii and others.*** The Borellia reads were compared against all sequenced Borrelia genomes to compute an SNP-based genetic distance matrix. The phylogenetic tree given in Supplementary Figure S10 supports LMAT’s ***finding that the Borrelia variant is divergent from B.burgdorferi.***
So, no it isn't proof of borrelia burgdorferi and it is likely divergent from it. Yet, now millions of people believe Lyme was a documented case in an iceman because of sensationalized headlines with zero followups to correct their misunderstanding.
The truth is that a form of “Lyme Disease” – or at least the bacterium that caused it – existed for many years before possibly the new, more virulent species showed up on the shores of Connecticut. Ask youself why this is?
Brown University published an accurate timeline of the appearance of the causative agent Borrelia Burgdorferi, as well as the troublesome vector for the illness the Ixodes tick.
However, what the timeline shows is an interesting lack of cases or research regarding the illness between 1934 and 1970.
Up to 1934, the agent and the reports of symptoms only came from Europe. The symptoms of that disease were relatively less extensive when compared to today’s form of the illness.
In 2008, a team of researchers at the University of Bath confirmed that the bacterium originated in Europe, with a traceable origin before the Ice Age, but it did not originate in North America.
The researchers tried to explain away the re-emergence of the bacterium in North America as related to the “restoration of woodland” in the 1970s, as reported by a Science Daily.
First, Americans have lived, played and worked in and around “woodland” for many decades, without any reports of the terrible neuroborreliosis illness in large numbers that plauges New England today. The tick bites and symptoms that did occur, were “benign” according to many peer reviewed studies on pubmed.
In other words, while the bacteria and the vector tick existed for many years, the arrival of this far more virulent and dangerous form of B. burgdorferi in Old Lyme, CT in 1975 and the fact that it severely affected a cluster of victims might indicate that something changed.
So, now my question is if Borrelia Burgdorferi's genetics were altered by man? And if we could find proof that a modification took place. That I don't know but am willing to research.