For years, there has been suspicion among some that modern-day tick-borne diseases aren’t just a natural occurrence, but phenomena born in a bioweapons laboratory.

While skeptics say the concern about tick weaponization belongs in the realm of science fiction, it's recently gained political traction.

Thanks in part to a science writer who contracted Lyme disease on Martha’s Vineyard, legislators in Washington, D.C. are calling for an investigation into a possible connection between tick-borne disease and places like the Plum Animal Disease Center in New York and Fort Detrick in Maryland.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan amendment that directs the inspector general of the Department of Defense to determine whether a biological weapons program enhanced the disease-carrying capabilities of ticks from 1950 to 1975, and whether any accidental or intentional releases of infected ticks or pathogens occurred.

The office of U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-NJ, said Kris Newby’s newly published book, “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons,” inspired him to write the amendment to the defense bill.

“Americans have a right to know whether any of this is true,” Smith said.

For Newby, a science writer at Stanford University and a senior producer of the Lyme disease documentary “Under Our Skin,” the mystery lies in why it has taken so long for legislators to delve into the origins of vector-borne diseases that have affected millions of Americans in the last few decades.

The House action “was a welcome surprise,” Newby said during a phone call.

“I’m very happy it’s raised the profile, the visibility of tick-borne diseases."

Most Americans have no idea that the U.S. government operated a large-scale bioweapons program during the Cold War, Newby said, calling the program "a really well-kept secret” whose confidentiality rivaled the Manhattan Project.

“Maybe this thing we call chronic Lyme is one of the germs that got out during the tests,” Newby said.

The idea behind biological weapons is to spread disease that incapacitates and weakens an enemy population, thus allowing an invading army to sweep in take over while preserving the territory’s infrastructure, Newby explains in “Bitten.”

At the center of Newby’s book is the late Wilhelm Burgdorfer, the Swiss-born scientist credited with discovering the corkscrew-shaped bacteria, or borrelia, that causes Lyme disease.

The pathogen transmitted by black-legged ticks was named after him and is known as borrelia burgdorferi.

But Newby believes that Burgdorfer, whose personal papers she viewed or copied, also knew about another, more dangerous pathogenic agent in ticks that he kept from the public. She calls the agent — possibly a rickettsia bacterium, possibly combined with a virus — “Swiss Agent USA.”

Relying on papers and declassified documents, Newby said she discovered that Burgdorfer used his entomological expertise to develop methods to grow ticks in large numbers and inject them with disease-causing pathogens.

Although Burgdorfer was based at a National Institutes of Health research facility in Montana, the Rocky Mountain Laboratory, Newby said he also worked as a contractor for the U.S. chemical and biological weapons program and spent time at Fort Detrick and a medical research unit in Cairo, Egypt.

Late in his life and suffering from Parkinson’s, Burgdorfer talked to Newby about some of his work. He said he had been “doing the things that the Nazis used to be doing,” such as putting plague in fleas and masking the viral load of tick disease to make it hard to detect, Newby said.

“He’s a scientist and here he’s saying, ‘I didn’t tell you everything I found in those ticks,'” Newby said. “I kept on digging.”

Although she never found a smoking gun, Newby’s research led her to believe a release of infected ticks occurred either by accident or on purpose during the 1960s.

The most famous outbreak was of Lyme arthritis, later known as Lyme disease, in 1968. The disease is named for the site of the outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut, across Long Island Sound from the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.

“I think the most likely scenario is a military experiment gone wrong or an accidental release from Plum Island Animal Disease Center of New York,” Newby wrote in “Bitten.”

What is less well-known is that the same year, there were outbreaks of Rocky Mountain spotted fever on Cape Cod and babesiosis on Nantucket, she wrote. Both diseases are carried by ticks.

It’s also possible that pathogen-soaked aerosols — the kind tested in the giant metal “eight ball” container at Fort Detrick — got loose, Newby said.

Dr. Sam R. Telford III, professor of infectious disease and global health at Tufts University and an expert on tick-borne disease, is not buying the bioweapons theory of disease.

“The late Willy Burgdorfer was a gentleman and a scholar in every way," Telford said in an email. "He would have been appalled at any request for advice on how to weaponize ticks."

There is no need for Congress to investigate links to Plum Island or other facilities, said Telford, who said tick-borne disease was detected in mice on Cape Cod as far back as 1894.

“It is a shame that our legislators spend so much time on garbage legislation proposed by some with too much time on their hands,” Telford wrote to colleagues after the House action.

Bethany Wing of Bourne, who has been treated for several tick-borne diseases including Lyme and babesiosis, said she has heard rumors about Plum Island for years.

“There are conspiracy theories,” Wing, 44, said.

“I don’t have answers. It just seems disturbing,” Wing said. “It needs to be put to rest whether it is or isn’t (true). It just needs closure.”

Newby calls the Lyme disease she and her husband, Paul Newby, contracted in 2002 on Nashawena Island across from Martha’s Vineyard “our long journey to hell and back.”

It started with a flu-like illness, with symptoms including malaise, fatigue, muscle pain, blurry vision and sensitivity to light, among other things.

Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with the fit athletic couple, but after a few months the Newbys developed brain fog and crushing fatigue. She could no longer read to her sons at bedtime and had trouble "processing time and space," Newby wrote.

"I’d run into the side of doorways and had trouble recalling the current month and year," she wrote.

After a year that included visits to 10 doctors and $60,000 in medical expenses, the couple was diagnosed with babesiosis and Lyme disease, prompting a years-long regimen to regain their health, Newby said.

While there is division in the medical community over whether Lyme infection persists, Burgdorfer himself came down squarely on the side of patients who said they had a chronic version of the tick-borne illness.

“He would regularly meet with sufferers and start crying when he heard their stories,” Newby said.

“Everybody loved Willy,” she added. “Even his sons didn’t know he was doing this work.”

In 1969, President Richard Nixon discontinued the U.S. offensive biological weapons program a year after more than 2,000 sheep died in a nerve agent accident near Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

But a release of infected ticks or aerosols containing genetically-modified tick disease pathogens would not have been a one-off incident, Newby said, not with climate change encouraging tick species to fan out and with suburbanization carving up land to make it more hospitable for tick hosts like mice and deer.

Disease in ticks or the air would end up in mammals that would provide a blood meal for and infect new ticks, Newby said.

“It’s the butterfly effect,” she said.

Newby’s book has received advanced praise from physicians and authors who view Lyme as a persistent, dangerous disease. Among them are Dr. Joseph J. Burrascano Jr., co-founder of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, and Mary Beth Pfeiffer, who wrote “Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change.”

“Kris Newby’s book is based on documents, photographs and other evidence,” Pfeiffer told the Times in an email.

“This body of information does not prove the Lyme disease was created in a government bioweapons lab, but it does offer compelling data that the government experimented with ticks and insects in unseemly ways,” justifying an examination by independent agencies within the government, Pfeiffer wrote.

Whether or not the House amendment eventually becomes part of the defense reauthorization bill, Newby said she hopes its proposal leads to more funding for tick-borne disease research and the release of documents withheld from her for purported reasons of national security.

“My hope is that this book will widen the lens on our view of this problem and inspire people to more aggressively pursue solutions,” Newby wrote.

— Follow Cynthia McCormick on Twitter: @CmccormickCCT