Plum Island demands a carefully written, unbiased look, not from both sides, but from all sides. It needs to be probed by someone who isn't obsessed with rooting out government waste and corruption, or wed to conspiracy theories. The purpose of this book, then, is to explore the last half century on Plum Island in depth — a half century of biological experimentation and scientific breakthroughs, darkened by upheaval, concealment, and astonishingly careless management. Plum Island's inhabitants are in many ways the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Except here, this gang's ammunition is the deadliest germs known to mankind.
It is my hope that the work presented here will shed some light on the fascinating story of Plum Island. May it prompt a frank and open discussion between the public and its government on protecting present and future generations from preventable catastrophes lurking in our midst— before the preventable becomes the inevitable.
PART 1
OUTBREAKS
1
1975: The Lyme Connection
Dear Ann,
Have you ever heard of Lyme disease? I am writing this letter because I know you can help thousands of people by warning them about this awful sickness. I have been battling it for 18 months. Frankly I am not doing well.
It would be impossible for me to describe the emotional and physical pain that I have been through. I am a 42-year-old man, married nearly 20 years, and have a family. The days of slinging a 100-pound sack of bird-seed over my shoulder and walking to the backyard are over.
Today I can't even lift a five-pound sack of flour. There was a time when I could play nine musical instruments. I sang in the church choir and ran my own small business. Today, I do none of the above. I am saving all my energy to fight Lyme disease.
The treatment costs are staggering. IV antibiotic therapy runs from $150 to $475 a treatment….We have already taken out a third mortgage on our home. Had I been aware of the symptoms from the beginning, I could have had $15 worth of oral antibiotics and that would have done the job.
Thank you, Ann, for allowing me to try to help others.
— S.J.N., Mattituck, N.Y.
Protecting a nuclear power plant is no small task. When it opened in the 1980s, the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island's North Shore boasted a 175-man militia equipped with Uzi 9-millimeters, AR-15 assault rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns. This elite paramilitary unit patrolled the "protected area," a dense forest hundreds of acres deep that buffered the "controlled area," a huge concrete dome sheltering the uranium nuclear reactor. Every eight hours, a fresh detachment of fifty men, armed to the teeth and clad in steel-toed boots, tan pants, and khaki shirts, marched in lockstep through the protected area along dirt paths and through marshes, their watchful eyes and ears continually scanning for intruders. One Shoreham security officer, a short, blond-bearded, barrel-chested man, remembers the scene during the 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift in October 1987. His platoon had just moved out, marching into a field where they often spotted herds of thirty or forty wild deer darting ahead of them into the wooded glen. He felt a brief pinch on his left ankle and thought it was the stiff new Army boots he was breaking in. Later that night, he went home and showered. Pulling off his white tube socks, he noticed a small red mark on his ankle. Those damn boots, he thought, and went to bed.
When he awoke the next morning, the nagging blister had grown, so he grabbed tweezers from the bathroom vanity and poked at the area. Suddenly, something started to move, and he realized it wasn't a blister at all. It was a live bug. Panicked, he frantically dug into it. As he extracted the critter, it broke in two, spilling its insides into the microscopic holes it punched into his body.
Seventy-two hours later, he thought he had caught the flu. Within a week, his joints began to ache.
Most people don't think of deer as swimmers. But swim they do. Indigenous to most of the United States and Canada, white-tailed deer can swim distances as long as four miles.
Their natural predators — wolf, bear, mountain lion, and coyote — are long extinct from the northeastern landscape, but one tiny foe remains. Poised atop a blade of grass, the deer tick waits patiently for anything warm-blooded to brush by, feeding on deer as well as smaller creatures like birds and mice. The tick jumps aboard and pierces its sharp mouth hooks into the skin of its unlucky host. A tiny glutton with a king-sized appetite, the tick sucks the blood of its host in a feast that can last up to two whole days, while it swells to a bubble over three times its original size. At the same time, the little parasite deposits its own fluids into the host, fluids that sometimes prove fatal.
The feeding habits of ticks and the swimming abilities of deer were of little concern to the residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut, in July 1975. This quaint New England town is, for the most part, an upper-crust community with tree-lined streets and fine colonial and Federal-style homes. As one of America's oldest towns, founded by English Puritans, Old Lyme was enjoying its tricentennial as the nation prepared for a bicentennial. But a strange set of occurrences that year would forever change its reputation from a warm, charming enclave to a place of fear and despair.
Old Lyme, nestled on the banks of the Connecticut River, sits just a shade north of the Long Island Sound. The midsummer weather in 1975 was typical for coastal Connecticut — hot, sticky, and humid. As little ones frolicked in the sun, ignoring the blistering heat, and grown-ups sought refuge on their porches by night, grateful for a balmy summer breeze, Polly Murray and Judith Mensch noticed something unusual about their children. Seemingly out of nowhere, they were showing signs of strange physical and mental ailments. Alarmed, the two mothers quickly phoned their neighbors, who were observing strikingly similar conditions in their own children. Many of the kids in the neighborhood — and some adults — were suffering from the same skin rashes, throbbing headaches, and painful swollen joints.
Together, Polly and Judith brought their concerns to the Connecticut Department of Health, which immediately appointed physicians from Yale University to investigate. Initially, the doctors misdiagnosed thirty-nine children and twelve adults with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition they named "Lyme arthritis," after the town where the strange outbreak occurred. Two years later, scientists linked Lyme arthritis to the bite of a deer tick. And in 1981, Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, discovered a thin spiral bacteria — in technical terms, a spirochete — immersed in the fluid of a deer tick. He proved that the new spirochete was to blame — not for a Lyme arthritis, but for an entirely new ailment: Lyme disease.
Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), named in honor of its discoverer, attacks humans in a number of ways, which is one reason why it remains difficult to diagnose. Characterized by symptoms such as facial paralysis and stiff swelling in the neck and joints, Bb also causes maladies like meningitis and encephalitis — both swellings of the brain — and cardiac problems, including atrioventricular block, myopericarditis, and cardiomegaly. Because Bb attacks the body's central nervous system, additional symptoms of Lyme disease include acute headaches, general fatigue, fever, moodiness, and depression.