Lyme, Plum, and Dr. Erich Traub
snappy
Thought folks might be interested in this intriguing history, mostly
quoted from the acclaimed book Lab 257 by Michael Carroll:
Dr. Erich Traub was a Nazi germ warfare scientist smuggled into the
United States in 1949 from the former Soviet Union under the auspices
of the top secret United States government program called Operation
Paperclip. Dr. Traub is known as the father of the Plum Island
biological warfare research lab, located 6 miles from Old Lyme
Connecticut. According to the book Lab 257 by acclaimed author Michael
Carroll, Dr. Traub was chief of of Insel Reims, a secret Nazi
biological warfare lab located on a crescent shaped island in the
Baltic sea. Traub worked directly for Adolph Hitler's second in
charge, Heinrich Himmler. At Insel Reims, Dr. Traub's interests
included personally collecting Rinderpest virus from Anatolia, and
packaging weaponized foot and mouth disease for dispersal onto cattle
and reindeer in Russia. Dr. Traub also experimented with the glanders
bacteria and had a particular fascination for organisms that
voraciously devour the brain.
In The Belarus Secret, John Loftus, the Justice Department employee
who exposed Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi, states that Nazi germ warfare
scientists had experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to
spread rare diseases. Loftus also states that he had received
information that the United States had tested some of these poison
ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut
during the early part of the 1950s.
According to former Plum Island lab director, Jerry Callis, as quoted
in "Lab 257:"
"Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of
containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on
the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last,
on and on, until its diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick
colony."
According to "Lab 257," a USDA 1978 document titled "African Swine
Fever," further confirms the use of ticks as biowar vectors on Plum
Island, noting that
"In 1975 and 1976 the adult and nyphal stages of Ablyomma americanum
(the Lone Star tick) and Ablyomma cajunense (the Cayenne tick) were
found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African Swine
fever virus."
Coincidentally, the Lyme disease outbreak was identified about the
time of the Swine Fever tick study conducted on Plum Island. Also at
the time of the Plum Island Swine Fever experiments, the Lone Star
tick's range was limited to Texas. Today it is endemic in New Jersey,
New York State and Connecticut, and as Carroll states in Lab 257, no
one can answer how the Lone Star tick migrated from Texas to New York
and Connecticut.
Erich Traub's legacy of experimentation using insects as disease
vectors continued during the 1980s at Plum Island under the
jurisdiction of Entomologist Dr. Richard Endris, who is reported to
have nurtured over 200,000 soft and hard ticks of varying species in
tick nurseries on Plum Island, personally collected from locations as
far away as Cameroon, Africa. In a footnote in Lab 257, Carroll notes
that Endris, while under contract with the US Army lab at Fort Detrick
had also conducted experiments in 1987 on Plum Island, using sand
flies as vectors of the fatal illness Leishmaniasis, in secrecy, with
no safety precautions.
All told, Dr. Traub worked with the U.S. Army, the Navy, the CIA and
the US Department of Agriculture, before returning to Germany in 1953,
and he is widely considered to be a founding father of biological
warfare research techniques used on Plum Island. Dr. Traub is known to
have visited Plum Island on at least three different occasions, and he
was ostensibly offered the directorship there several times. According
to his National Defense Program FBI application form, he was born on
June 27, 1906 in Asperglen and he died in Germany in 1988.
Greatcod
orders" bio-researchers.