> What’s the strangest sort of question you have to handle?
> Keesing: The conspiracy theory that the government made the Lyme bacterium, that’s gotta be up there. I mean, really?
> Ostfeld: There was a man at a public event where I was speaking a few years ago who, in the question and answer session, pontificated about how the Lyme disease bacterium was created by the CIA at Plum Island as a biowarfare weapon — which if you know anything about this bacterium is absolutely ludicrous. It would be the stupidest biowarfare weapon you could possibly imagine. In any event, I said that this was actually not true, the DNA of this bacterium has been amplified in museum specimens of mice that were collected around the turn of the 20th century. So that predates Plum Island. And I said, there was a recent discovery of a mummified human corpse in the Swiss Alps in a National Geographic expedition that was 13,000 years old and they amplified Borrelia burgdorferi DNA from this mummified frozen corpse. And this guy responded by saying, "Yeah, so, you think it’s far fetched that the CIA would take this frozen human corpse and dump it out of a helicopter in the Swiss Alps to cover up what they did?" So there’s no correcting the conspiracy theorists.