"I agree with you that it looks like there's more of an incidence here of Lyme disease," said Moon, "but that might be due to improvements in diagnosis."
"Above all," Director Moon said to the trio on their way out, "do no harm — that's the first principle. Is it risky doing research on foreign animal diseases? I can't say there is no time, no way, a virus can get out of here. The possibility is so small — we take a calculated risk. And the risk-benefit ratio says, 'Let's do it.' "
Forbes was visibly perturbed on the ferry ride back to Long Island. The surprise visit hadn't yielded a smoking gun. Not finding what he was looking for, he left behind a long, detailed letter demanding answers. But the aggressive congressman and the two gumshoes had forewarned them. Dangers still lurked on Plum Island — Forbes was certain of it. "As long as I'm a member of Congress," he promised he would watch over the island like a hawk.
LYME ISLAND
By 1990, the east end of Long Island had, by leaps and bounds, the largest incidence of Lyme disease in the nation. But why?
The Geography. You can pinpoint cases of Lyme disease on a map of the United States by drawing a circle around the area of largest infection. Now you can tighten that circle until a single point is reached. That point? Plum Island. Spokes radiate outward from this point and pass through neighborhoods boasting the highest rates of Lyme disease contamination in the nation.
The Vectors. In the 1950s, the cocking of a rifle was often heard on Plum Island, portending the demise of deer that swam from the mainland to forage. Over time, fewer rifle shots were heard as the numbers of deer swimming to and fro increased, collecting ticks along the way. And while deer were sporadically shot, there was no stopping the wild birds. Retired scientists Jim and Carol House have been "birding" on Plum Island for over twenty years now, never missing an Audubon Society Christmas bird count, where they scout the terrain with binoculars, scribbling notes and snapping pictures. "Plum Island has a unique bird life," says Jim House. "It's got purple sandpipers, harlequin ducks, robins, eiders, osprey, warblers, and woodcocks," says Carol. Plum even hosts golden and bald eagles, who come in and dine on the baby Canadian geese. "It's one of their favorite stops in the springtime." There's no short supply of bald eagle food, because massive flocks of Canadian geese rule the island in droves. "We call them the Canadian Air Force," says one worker. "We made a list of a hundred and forty different species," says Carol. "One time I counted over two hundred brown creepers." The American Museum of Natural History runs a wild bird colony on seventeen-acre Great Gull Island, just east of Plum Island, and no doubt that has something to do with the plethora of fowl.
Plum Island, an untrammeled plot of wild nature, lies in the middle of the Atlantic flyway, the bird migration highway that runs between breeding grounds and winter homes from the Caribbean to the Florida coast, up the East Coast to the icy reaches of Greenland.
Plum Island breeders like Canadian geese, osprey, and seagulls nest on the island and make local trips to Connecticut and Long Island. Hundreds of thousands more, in all shapes and sizes, also gather on Plum Island, resting before crossing the Sound in the spring and flying along the Connecticut River valley toward Maine and Nova Scotia. Take swallows, for example. "One day you'd see a couple on the telephone wire," says Carol, "and then ten the next day, and then all of the sudden you'd see a hundred, then nothing. They'll wait until they get this critical mass, then go." Exactly where they settle is up to wind conditions at the time, which is often their first landfall.
That first landfall is Long Island and the Hamptons to the south and west, and coastal Connecticut, including Old Lyme, to the north. When the birds aren't migrating, they constantly travel locally between Long Island, Plum Island, and Connecticut for food and companionship. Thanks to all of this bird activity, Plum Island presents more vectors for the spread of infectious disease spread than perhaps anywhere else. Ticks have a long and varied menu: droves of small foraging birds (ticks find baby chicks irresistible), a tantalizing wild deer habitat, and thousands of mice and rats for tick larvae and nymphs to feed on. Plum Island is a Lyme disease tinderbox.
Because the wildlife vectors are beyond control, safety at Plum Island has to be controlled from the inside out. The only way, then, for Plum Island to be 100 percent fail-safe is to keep the biological blood samples and germs dormant, sealed and padlocked inside laboratory freezers.
But for the lab to do its work, these same germs have to be taken out, thawed, and uncorked on lab benches. And that's where the vulnerability begins, as Dr. Moon pointed out.
"Let's face it," Plum Island scientist Dr. Douglas Gregg once said to a reporter, "there can be no absolute guarantee of securing the island."
The Theories. Attempts by the scientific community to explain the origin of Lyme disease are far from convincing. One popular theory holds that ticks always had Bb bacteria — germs similar to Bb existed in Europe and Asia for three hundred years — and infections are the result of the human-altered habitat in which the pests live. A century ago, goes the theory, there were far fewer woods in the United States, and deer were near extinct. Because of the modern conservation movement, forests replaced farmlands and populations of deer, birds, and small animals surged. In this environment, ticks multiplied. Suburban developments did the same. As Dr. Ralph Tierno reasons, "By the mid-1970s, human beings' collective behavior had created circumstances that so favored the spread of Lyme disease that sooner or later it was bound to attract people's notice and demand a protective response….[W]e made our own sickbed and then we had to lie in it."
This theory assumes that Lyme disease was a gradual problem that "attracted attention." Nothing is further from the truth. What occurred in Old Lyme in 1975 was the outbreak of an unknown illness, concentrated within a defined geographic location that infected thirty-nine children and twelve adults. It was a modest epidemic. Old Lyme's outbreak was a footprint of something that had deposited itself there and festered. Lyme disease cannot simply be ascribed to poor land-use patterns, when ten miles south of Old Lyme lies an untamed island teeming with ticks, birds, deer, and mice, hosting two high-hazard germ laboratories proven to be anything but reliable in containing foreign germs.
White-tailed deer often swim across Plum Gut, the two-mile-wide strait that separates Plum Island from Long Island. Countless birds— including seagulls, Canadian geese, and osprey — fly between coastal Connecticut, Long Island, and Plum Island. Old Lyme lies directly in the flight vector of birds that congregate on Plum Island and migrate north and south along the East Coast. When biological security was taken seriously in the early 1950s, deer were shot on sight by trained snipers. Even puppies and dogs, fatefully setting their paws on the island's beaches with their owners, would be euthanized. By 1975, germs on Plum Island increased in both numbers and virulence — but safety and security measures moved in the opposite direction.