Chuck Bryant

But it makes for good press.

I mean, like if you look up like Lyme disease and bioweapon, there is a lot of recent articles written on it just because a member of Congress introduced this legislation.

Yeah.

What a lot of people are saying is, look, it makes sense, like this conspiracy theory, that people would go to that.

But at the same time, there's another really great explanation for it, and it's climate change.

That this whole thing came about in the 70s because we're starting to see what was called the first epidemic from climate change.

And there's this really great article on Aeon, which is a great website, by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, spells it like Michelle Pfeiffer with a P, called Ticks Rising.

And she's an investigative reporter, a science journalist, who really went to a lot of trouble to explain how climate change has created a new world for ticks, and we are now living in it.

Yeah, I mean, in 2014, the EPA actually started to use four new indicators about what's going on with climate change and the impact, and one of them was the spread of Lyme disease.

So, like, the EPA officially uses that as a factor.

and an indicator in determining the impact of climate change now.

Right.

And so the whole basis of this idea is that because of warmer weather, ticks are being killed off in far fewer numbers over the winter, so they're surviving longer.

As it gets warmer and warmer, higher and higher up,

their range is spreading rather rapidly.

Oh, yeah.

And wherever these ticks go, Lyme disease is game to go with them.

So the spread of Lyme disease is increasing as the spread of ticks is increasing too.

And ticks have gotten totally out of hand in some areas.

In that same Aeon article, Mary Beth Pfeiffer was talking about how moose are dying in their thousands in like Wisconsin and the Dakotas because they're being bled to death.