Re: OT: Did anyone see Nova last night on the Ice Man and Lyme?

October 28, 2011

Wow ,

As I started reading this I wondered if you were going to talk about Lyme and

you sure did! 5000 years ago and we thought this was a disease from our recent

past... I've heard as far back as 1888 and more recently when doctors were

finally able to dx Lyme in 1974, meaning Lyme became known sometime in the late

19th to 20th Century.. ... But 5000 years, that is just plain freaky...

I wonder how much this ice man was affected by this disease, or are we more

affected today because of the workings at Plum Island back in the '50's...

Thanks for posting this..

Jim

>

> Last night NOVA on PBS aired a program about the 5,000 year old Ice Man.

Scientists briefly thawed out the Ice Man to do tests on him. They determined

that he had arthritis and heart disease and was in his early forties. His

stomach contents revealed a natural diet with some grain that was related to

wheat. The most interesting fact though was the DNA which was extracted from a

thigh bone to avoid any foreign DNA contamination which was only 97% pure the

other 3% was from another DNA source. The scientists determined that the DNA

was Borrelia and that the ice man had Lyme disease he also showed evidence of

joint damage. This proves that the Lyme bacteria has been around a very long

time. However, this is not to say that the Borrelia Bacteria that is infecting

people today has not been weaponized by scientists on Plum Island to be more

difficult to eradicate. Another point of interest was the fact that the

scientists could not understand why given the fact that the Ice man ate a very

natural diet that he would have heart disease. I can't believe that the

scientists did not make the correlation between Lyme and the Ice man's heart

disease. It just goes to show how little science really understands about Lyme

and it's potential to do more then just cause arthritis.

>

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