Is Lyme Disease a Man-Made Plague? | Joe Rogan and Tom Papa

There's one city in Pakistan. Is it Karachi? What is that city? Why can't I remember the name? Is that it? That was one of the cities that Shane Smith from Vice was saying was one of the most terrifying places on earth. Oh yeah. Because the sheer cheapness of murder, like how cheap it is to get someone murdered over there. Oh really? And how much murder and crime goes on over there. Oh god. Just a totally different metric. Yeah. And that's why I remember how you view the world. Totally different perception of what life is worth and what life is like. Yeah. And what kind of violence you have to deal with on a daily basis. Oh god. I know. There's a lot of very dark places. That's why I don't like to travel. You don't like travel at all? I do like to travel, but I don't, I'm starting to cross off a bunch of places. That's too sketch? Yeah. You know. Between getting parasites that make you have to poop in a bag and send to your doctor or ending up in real violent places that don't have the same kind of rules that we do. My friend Justin Ren, who runs Fight for the Forgotten Charity. I was just wearing his shirt at the beach yesterday. Oh were you? Yeah. That's awesome. Best guy ever. Yeah. He has a new intestinal parasite that's draining him and he doesn't know what the fuck it is. No. Yeah. He's got something that he caught when he was over there. Oh no. That's what I'm afraid of. He's really sick. Is he really? Yeah. I don't know. They're going to have to, hopefully. Identify it. Yeah. They have to figure out what it is. Figure out how he got it. Figure out what's going on. That's no joke. What happened in the Dominican Republic? Didn't they, people died because they were drinking from the mini bar to hear that story? Yes. Yes. There's a lot of sketch. Yeah. They were saying that people were putting stuff in the mini bar that wasn't actually alcohol. Yeah. The story that I had heard was that they would put cheap substitutes for whatever the alcohol was supposed to be so that people would pay for it and then they would steal the actual liquor and replace it with something else. Then people would drink it and it was poisonous. They were dying. People really died. Yeah. That's terrible. I hope he's okay. I don't know what the actual story was. But somebody else described it saying, the one thing is you concentrate on statistics. I don't know if this is true. We should find out. If you concentrate on statistics, then it seems like a lot of people die in the Dominican Republic when they were over there. But the reality is that it's just the way we're looking at it because we've chosen to start focusing on people who die over there. But in fact, it's commensurate with people that die over here when they're on vacation. Right. But only a certain number go to that resort. You know what I mean? It was more than one resort, I believe. It was? Yeah. I think so. Well, a lot of people go to the Dominican, not now, but a lot of people work once. I was there last year. Were you? Yeah. So would you go back after all this? No. I saw a story about a couple that went there and got hookworm in their feet. Oh, you could definitely get that. From the beach. That, I was already like, maybe I'm not going back. And now that you can't even drink from the mini bar, I'm like, you know what? There's nice places in Laguna Beach. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about, Laguna. Did you know that hookworm was responsible for- Pismo Beach. Hookworm was responsible for the stereotype of the Southern dummy. No. Yeah. What do you mean? People walking around the South barefoot were getting hookworm en masse, and hookworm has a detrimental effect on your ability to think. Oh. Yeah. Literally compromises your mental ability. It makes you dumber. So like the trope of like a hillbilly walking- Exactly. Really? Yup. Yup. Oh, weird. Yup. Hookworm. Did we find out about that from Peter Hotez? Is that who told us that? That is weird. Hookworm gave the South a bad name. Oh my God. Yeah. Hookworms once sapped the American South of its health, and few realize that they continue to afflict millions. Jeez. Yeah. You look so creepy. It fucks with the way you think. Makes you tired. Gives you fatigue. Yeah. This podcast has turned very dark. Insatiable exhaustion. Listen to this. Weeks later, victims succumbed to an insatiable exhaustion and impenetrable haziness of the mind that some called stupidity. Adults neglected their fields, and children grew pale and listless. Victims developed grossly distended bellies and angel wings, emaciated shoulder blades, accentuated by hunching, all gazed out dully from sunken sockets with a telltale fish-eye stare. That is the stereotype of people from the South. We just always thought they're just living in hot weather, and they're just stupid. God. But what it really was- Was worms. Was fucking hookworm. Isn't that amazing? This podcast started off, we were having fun. We were talking about judo. The culprit behind the germ of laziness as the South's affliction was sometimes called was Nekotor Americanus, the American murderer, better known as the hookworm. It's called the American murderer. Are they still out there? Millions of those blood sucking parasites lived fed, yeah, for sure, and died within the guts of up to 40% of the population stretching from southeastern Texas to West Virginia. Can you imagine 40% of the population of the South in these places from Texas to West Virginia was infected? 40% of the population with a fucking worm that makes you dumb and loose. I'm never going anywhere ever again. Isn't that incredible? That's insane. But that's where the stereotype came from. Wow. How wild. That's crazy. That's insane. Now, how many people are getting, right now, getting Lyme disease? And Lyme disease, although it doesn't make you lazy, it wrecks your health, devastates your health. Wrecks you for years. Yep. That shit is happening right now in the East Coast. It's all over the East Coast. My kids were back there working on a farm over the summer and my daughter had a tick on her. We freaked out. Mm, should freak out. Yeah. You got to get it off of them before 24 hours. But you also, if you do get infected, you have to get on antibiotics really quickly. Super fast. There's a woman who wrote a book about Lyme disease possibly being a military biological weapon that accidentally was released. Really? Yeah. Apparently, this is a popular thought that there's something about Lyme disease that Lyme disease doesn't necessarily make sense. How quickly it came from this one area, like this Lyme, Connecticut area, and how rapidly it spread and how devastating its impact was. And there is, apparently, there has been some research that's been, well, not some, quite a bit of research that's done on various biological weapons and various distribution methods. And one of the thoughts of a lot of these distribution methods is infecting bugs. Infecting bugs with some designer disease and then infecting the population. Like if you release the bugs on this area that you wanted to attack, like at a certain point in time, and you infected giant chunks of the population, then you would be able to go back there 10 years later and everybody would be fucked. Wow. This is something that, biological diseases, whether it's anthrax, things along those lines and things. Yeah, terrifying. But they've made those forever. They've had that and people have been aware of that forever. But the idea of it being something that's in a bug and that can infect you. Geez Louise, that's terrifying. Yeah. Are you trying to make it that I don't go out of my house? Trying to freak you out, bro. No, it's weird that it's, I mean, I don't remember being around when we were kids. It wasn't around. It wasn't around. It wasn't around. And I think it took a while for anybody to figure out what the fuck it was. How about the new mosquitoes that we have? Yes. Well, there's also- We never had these mosquitoes before. There's a recent case of a horrible disease breaking out in the East Coast. I think somewhere in Massachusetts, there is some horrible mosquito-borne disease. What does that thing say about the ticks, about Lyme disease? What is the book? It's called Bitten. Yes, that's it. It's written by Chris Newby K with K-R-I-S, Chris. Is that a man or a woman? It's a woman. But yeah, she discovered circumstantial evidence licking the outbreak of Lyme disease in the 1960s, the US military. Some people say this is bullshit, but some people say it's just conspiracy theory. Who's some people? Put up the article so we can see it? It's the middle of the- Give me, let's see, spread it out so I can see it. Scroll down. Okay, the DOD, go back up. Stop. The DOD takes extreme care of all of its research programs to ensure the protection of our personnel and the community. What is that? When Smith announced his amendment- Okay, this is too much there. Says there's just too much evidence for a reasonable man or woman to just turn the page and say, put on your tinfoil hat. This is just a conspiracy theory, Smith said. And yet people with credentials will say that, which begs the question, why would they even say that? Chris Newby wrote the book, Bitten said she discovered circumstantial evidence linking the outbreak of Lyme disease in the 1960s. That's what you said from the US military. As proof, Newby cites an interview that she had, stop right there, with Wilberg Daufer, the American scientist who discovered what causes Lyme disease, who told her shortly before his death that he had been instructed to keep his research and a possible cause for Lyme disease a secret. My hypothesis was, is that the biological weapon they were trying to cover up that- Oh, my hypothesis is that was the biological weapon they were trying to cover up. Said Newby, a science writer at the Stanford School of Medicine in California. I don't believe it. Seems like a lot of malarkey. She said, I can't connect the dots right now. Says Newby who survived Lyme disease. My theory is that it was a genetically engineered rickettsia bacteria, but as a journalist, I can't prove that. So what is she saying then? She's just pulling stuff out. She wrote a book. She wrote a book, yeah. Yeah, I ain't buying it. But that's not to say, that does worry me more than anything. I think she's a hoser. I don't know her personally, but- If you have a guess. Probably. But I think that- You know that you're bread? Yeah. I would never give her my bread. That scares me more than anything though. It should scare you. A plague of some sort. Sure. I always feel like we should be keeping some medicine in the house. Plague medicine? Yeah. Like what gun? I don't know. Tetracycline. Is that good for plague? I don't know. I figure you have to take something. What the hell could be good for plague? Depends what the plague is. Really? If it's a flu, there's certain things you can take. If it's crazy war bugs, probably nothing. But there's so many people and it's so gross and you can see how people just coughing in the airports without covering their mouths. That's gonna happen.