Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Selects: The Skinny on Lyme Disease About this episode If you live in the Northeastern U. S. then you may know someone who has had Lyme disease. But it's spreading all over the country and parts of the world. Learn all about this tick-borne disease in this classic episode.
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1:52 Josh Clark? And for this week's S Y S Case Select, I've chosen our September 2019 episode on Lyme Disease. This one's pretty fascinating because it turns out Lyme Disease has a ton of intrigue associated with it. It started out with a cluster of weird symptoms of people in Connecticut, and then they finally figured out it was coming from ticks. But the mystery wasn't over because people started developing chronic Lyme, and at first, the medical community didn't believe they had any disease whatsoever. They thought it was all in their heads. Well, they were wrong. You can find out about all this and more in this episode on Lyme Disease. Enjoy.
2:34 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:44 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. This is Stuff You Should Know, uh, the podcast. And Chuck, I have a question for you.
2:56 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:58 Josh Clark? You know what ticks me off?
3:01 Josh Clark? Lyme disease.
3:05 Speaker 03 I'm so mad at you.
3:06 Josh Clark? Blame Yumi for that one. She's like, "You should say this." And I said, "You know what, dear, I should totally say that."
3:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, this is sort of a follow-up to our July 27, 2010 episode, Why Ticks Suck, which, uh, in which, which is sort of a legendary episode because we falsely promised to send people T-shirts if they made it all the way through the episode.
3:29 Josh Clark? That's right, that's right.
3:30 Speaker 03 We were just kidding, but we still get those requests of, "Where's my shirt?"
3:33 Josh Clark? Yes, that's hilarious. I forgot about that.
3:36 Speaker 03 And also wanna-
3:36 Josh Clark? We'd get sued today.
3:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, probably so. Um, also want to point out and shout out our former website, HowStuffWorks.com, because a couple of the articles that we used for much of this episode is from the old HSW website.
3:52 Josh Clark? Nice. They're holding it down over there.
3:54 Speaker 03 They're holding it down, and this is some good stuff.
3:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, so we're talking today about Lyme disease in particular.
4:01 Speaker 03 Not limes.
4:03 Josh Clark? No, we should say it's capital L-Y-M-E disease. And the reason it's called that is because it's named after a town, which is one of three towns where the initial outbreak of Lyme disease that led to this bacterial infection, persistent bacterial infection, was first described medically.
4:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, one of the facts of the show, I think.
4:25 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
4:26 Speaker 03 Sure. Who knew it was named after a town? Lyme, Connecticut.
4:29 Josh Clark? I knew.
4:30 Speaker 03 Did you know that before this?
4:31 Josh Clark? Sure.
4:32 Speaker 03 Did we cover that in Why Ticks Suck?
4:33 Josh Clark? I don't think so.
4:35 Speaker 03 All right. Well, you're smarter than me then.
4:36 Josh Clark? No, it's not that. I think what, what got me was I, I heard about people saying, like, "No, Lyme disease, like, people take it for granted, but it's actually some, this really mysterious illness." And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" So I think I looked into this years back, and that's when I found out.
4:51 Speaker 03 All right.
4:51 Josh Clark? That was all.
4:52 Speaker 03 So we're equally smart.
4:53 Josh Clark? Right, exactly. I'm not smarter than you.
4:55 Speaker 03 And what is smart? It's just like- Someone happens to know one thing, someone else knows another?
5:00 Josh Clark? Sure.
5:01 Speaker 03 I say they cancel out, we're all smart.
5:03 Josh Clark? There you go. I'm glad you pulled that out, because I would have been like, what is smarts?
5:09 Josh Clark? I couldn't have come up with the definition.
5:10 Speaker 03 So, Lyme disease, we'll go ahead and hit you with a couple of stats here. Lyme disease in the United States has more than doubled since 1997.
5:20 Josh Clark? That's astounding.
5:22 Speaker 03 It is, and it has spread too. It used to be very much localized in kind of the northeast, and sort of mid-Atlantic areas, some in the south. But now, you can get Lyme disease in, I believe, the entire lower 48, is that correct?
5:38 Josh Clark? There are cases in all 48 states. Supposedly, half of the counties in the United States now are considered at high risk for Lyme disease. And like, all of this happened just in the last, like, 20 or so years.
5:52 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:53 Josh Clark? Which is, I mean, there's a lot of debate over, the CDC calls Lyme disease endemic, which is a disease that has become a, like, an ongoing part of an area or region. And some other people are saying, guys, what we're talking about here is an epidemic. This is an epidemic, and you should start calling it that, because it will kind of raise the alarm to the next level or two, where it should be, because this is a very alarming spread of disease that we're seeing right now. Lyme disease is the number-one vector-borne disease in the United States. It's way more prevalent than things like West Nile, or Chikungunya, or anything like that. But it's still kind of treated as like, up there in the northeastern US thing, and
6:38 Josh Clark? that's just not the case. It's spread, in every direction except east, because it hit the Atlantic. But everywhere else where it can spread into the interior of the United States, and up into Canada, it's starting to.
6:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, and there's also a history continuing to this day even, where Lyme disease can be...
6:58 Speaker 03 Overlooked, misdiagnosed, not taken as seriously by your doctor as it should be.
7:05 Josh Clark? Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 03 Including what we'll get to later on, something called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. And it's all very frustrating if you have been a, an individual that has had Lyme disease.
7:18 Josh Clark? Yeah.
7:18 Speaker 03 There's a big community out there of people that are like, why won't anyone listen to us? Why won't our doctors take us seriously? And what do we have to do here? Like, do we have to start dropping dead?
7:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of frustration in, in that community because the, there's a sentiment among the medical establishment that, you know.
7:37 Speaker 03 Take some antibiotics, you'll be fine.
7:38 Josh Clark? Exactly. It's easy to cure Lyme disease, here's some antibiotics, you still have persistent symptoms? Those are probably in your head. We're not going to say they're in your head, but they're in your head. And the people who are experiencing these symptoms are like, no, my life has, has been derailed by these symptoms and you guys aren't doing anything about it.
7:56 Speaker 03 It's frustrating. I know there's a lot of people out there that are pretty, pretty stoked right now to be hearing this.
8:01 Josh Clark? Yeah.
8:01 Speaker 03 You know?
8:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure.
8:03 Speaker 03 We're advocating for you guys.
8:04 Josh Clark? Sure.
8:05 Speaker 03 Not patting myself on the back, although I am literally patting myself.
8:07 Josh Clark? Like, I see you, Chuck.
8:10 Josh Clark? That elbow's sticking out pretty far.
8:12 Speaker 03 So Lyme disease is a disease. It's an infection caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi.
8:22 Josh Clark? Wow.
8:22 Speaker 03 Borgdorferi, burgdorferi.
8:25 Josh Clark? We're gonna get you an apron and call you the word butcher.
8:28 Speaker 03 Burgdorferi, mork, mork, mork. And we'll get to why it's called that in a bit.
8:33 Josh Clark? Okay.
8:33 Speaker 03 But if you haven't caught on by now, it is transmitted through tick bites.
8:37 Josh Clark? Right. So a tick, and in particular, a nymph stage of a tick, which is a, like, young adult or juvenile tick, will transmit this bacteria. The Borrelia burgdorferi into a human. And the reason we usually get it from nymphs, Chuck, is because an adult tick doesn't find humans particularly appetizing.
9:00 Speaker 03 No.
9:00 Josh Clark? But a nymph tick will, because they're stupid. They don't know anything yet. So as they're feeding on us, after somewhere maybe around 24 to 36 hours of feeding, this infected tick that has this bacteria in it, the bacteria will make its way from the mid gut to the tick saliva and the tick transmits it into the human bloodstream, where it just absolutely wreaks havoc on the the human body.
9:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you said something really key there. Uh, 24, 36, 48 hours later. Really, really important. They have to be attached to you for that long, sometimes even longer, to transmit this bacterium. So if you find a tick on you and you get it off, you don't need to sweat Lyme disease.
9:42 Josh Clark? No.
9:42 Speaker 03 If you get it off in due time.
9:44 Josh Clark? Right, exactly. If like you see it's still crawling on you, it's unattached, you don't worry about it at all. But when it is attached and when it, when it has transmitted the bacteria, uh, what it's transmitted, this B. burgdorferi is like really amazing at its job, which is infecting you, giving you a bacterial infection.
10:05 Josh Clark? It, it has figured out how to zoom through the bloodstream, but then also take itself out of the bloodstream by latching on to the, the walls of your blood vessels.
10:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, this was crazy about this cellular stuff, that once it's attached to a cell, they said it's like a slinky. It doesn't let go. It just like basically reaches out and grabs the next cell without letting go of the previous cell. And just sort of walks end over end.
10:30 Josh Clark? Right.
10:31 Speaker 03 Never unattaching itself.
10:32 Josh Clark? Right, exactly. So, um, as it's moving along, it's never, it, it, it's not going to get kind of, you know, washed away in the extracellular matrix. It's stuck to the cell if it wants to be stuck to the cell. It can do the same thing to the blood vessel walls to pull itself out of the bloodstream and then go attack, you know, specific parts of the body. So it, it's really good at hanging on. That's one thing that makes it kind of pernicious.
10:57 Speaker 03 Like ticks?
10:57 Josh Clark? And then another thing, exactly. It's basically, yeah, it's like the bacteria version of a tick. I didn't think about that. And then another thing it does Chuck, I think this is really, really recent research. It can actually change its protein expression at a much faster rate than the normal mutation rate for bacteria, something like 15 times faster.
11:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, what that does is that just makes it really hard for our human immune system to catch up to it.
11:24 Josh Clark? Right, because our immune system will produce antibodies based on the initial infection, but by the time the antibodies come around, the bacteria may have changed itself so that the antibodies won't recognize it, they'll just go right past it because it doesn't fit the description that the antibodies have.
11:43 Speaker 03 That's right, and you'll know that something bad is happening, first of all, if you find that tick, but if you get headaches, fever, fatigue is a huge, huge symptom.
11:55 Josh Clark? Yep.
11:55 Speaker 03 But the real telltale is what's called EM, it's an expanding skin rash called erythema migrans, and it's like, it's that circular pattern, and I know we did talk about this on the ticks episode, but
12:09 Josh Clark? Sure.
12:10 Speaker 03 It's a circular pattern with what looks like a bull's eye in the center of it.
12:13 Josh Clark? Yes, and you can take off your butcher's apron now because you just, that was beautiful. Put on your chef's hat.
12:20 Speaker 03 You're sweating over there.
12:22 Josh Clark? Yeah, so that, that particular rash, that bull's eye rash, that is like just an absolute telltale sign that you have a Lyme borreolus, borre- uh oh.
12:33 Speaker 03 Here's the apron.
12:35 Josh Clark? Borreliosis infection, that only comes around in like maybe 70 to 80% of cases. I think if every, if every person got that rash, we would not have this, this problem with Lyme disease because it would be caught very quickly because you get that within usually about a week or less of getting infected, but it doesn't come up in all cases. And with some of those other symptoms, like you said, like weakness, headaches, flu-like symptoms, like those could be a lot of different other things, joint pain, and so the Lyme disease infection goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed in a lot of cases or did for many, many years.
13:19 Josh Clark? It's just now that they're starting to kind of recognize it or suspect Lyme when otherwise they might not have.
13:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, literally hundreds of things can be, can have the same symptoms as Lyme disease. So Lyme's been around for a long time. We'll talk about the history here in a minute as far as the 1970s go and official recognition, but it's been around, I believe Yale School of Public Health find the bacterium in ancient North America, like 60,000 years old.
13:50 Josh Clark? Right.
13:51 Speaker 03 Before the arrival of humans. They have an autopsy of a 5,300-year-old mummy that had Lyme disease.
14:00 Josh Clark? Yeah, you know, Utsi, the Iceman. Remember him?
14:03 Speaker 03 I remember Utsi.
14:05 Josh Clark? Yeah, I was disappointed that they referred to him as a 5,300-year-old mummy. It's like, no, it's Utsi, the Iceman. Everybody knows him.
14:11 Speaker 03 Give him his name.
14:12 Josh Clark? But he had Lyme disease.
14:13 Speaker 03 He did, and there was a German physician named Alfred Buckwald, who described this, that EM skin rash that we now call Lyme disease about 130 years ago.
14:24 Josh Clark? Right, so Lyme disease has been around a while, but we are just now seeing a huge, again, an epidemic of it and a massive spread of it, not just in North America, but there's also two other kinds of ticks that transmit to other kinds of Lyme-causing bacteria in Europe and Asia. And in all three places, North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, the incidence of Lyme disease is picking up at an alarming pace.
14:55 Speaker 03 I think we should slow down our pace, take a break.
14:58 Josh Clark? Okay, alright.
14:59 Speaker 03 And we'll come back and we'll talk about Lyme, Connecticut, right after this.
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18:41 Speaker 03 All right. So Lime, Connecticut, something that is very old hat to you.
18:46 Josh Clark? Right.
18:46 Speaker 03 Branded to me.
18:47 Josh Clark? I've known about it for years.
18:48 Speaker 03 Lime, old Lime, and what was the third town?
18:51 Josh Clark? I don't remember.
18:52 Speaker 03 No, let's just call it, uh, New Lime.
18:56 Speaker 03 It was not New Lime.
18:56 Josh Clark? They're gonna be so mad. Their high school football team is gonna go berserk on old Lime this year.
19:02 Speaker 03 Uh, in the 1970s, though, there were a group of children and adults in these towns in Connecticut that were having all these weird symptoms. Uh, swollen knees, skin rashes, headaches, uh, all this severe fatigue. And it's bad enough these days, but in the early 1970s, doctors were definitely, did not have this on the radar and were very dismissive of what was going on in these towns. And if it were not for the work of Judith Minch and Polly Murray, two just regular moms, although Polly Murray did work for the World Health Organization for a while, they were advocates. They were patient advocates because their families were getting sick and no one would listen. And they were like, someone's
19:45 Speaker 03 gotta do something. Something's going on here and these doctors are not being any help.
19:50 Josh Clark? Right.
19:51 Speaker 03 And it was a big deal. Polly Murray ended up writing a book. She made it sort of her life's work, uh, in 1996, a book called The Widening Circle. And, uh, because of, uh, sort of the persistent sexism in science, they were largely discounted, even though they had a list of 37 individuals. They researched on their own, contacted scientists.
20:12 Speaker 03 Uh, I just, we just really need to shout them out. Polly Murray died, um, just about a month ago, uh, at the age of 85.
20:18 Josh Clark? Oh, is that right?
20:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
20:19 Josh Clark? Yeah, she was a persistent cuss, as they call them up in the Yankee states.
20:23 Speaker 03 That's right.
20:24 Josh Clark? So, um, On the one hand, yes, from the everything I've read and all the impressions I have, they were very much dismissed and it was very much sexist. And also, I think, because they weren't doctors. But on the other hand, the doctors who were being presented with these cases were like, I have no idea what this is, so let's just pretend it's not real. But luckily, those two women in the groups that they established, they went on and they contacted Yale Medical School, they contacted the state, and they really kind of put this on the map. They said, there is a mysterious epidemic that's going on, where you have a lot of kids who suddenly have juvenile arthritis out of nowhere. What are you guys gonna do about it?
21:05 Josh Clark? And because of their agitation, this mystery made its way to the desk, or I guess the microscope, of a guy named Willie Bergdorfer. And he was, at the time, the world's foremost authority on what's called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is another tick-borne bacterial infection.
21:26 Speaker 03 I remember that when I was a kid. That was a big news item.
21:29 Josh Clark? It was.
21:30 Speaker 03 A scary one.
21:30 Josh Clark? He was working out in Colorado, and Colorado was ground zero for Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever for a while. Which is, yeah, you do not want to have that. It's a really bad bacterial infection. But by this time, they had done, thanks to the legwork done by the moms and the patient advocate groups in Lyme, Connecticut, it had been pretty well established that the common thread between all these people, besides where they lived, and by the way, it was Chuck Lime, Old Lime, and East Hattam. Sorry, East Hattam. Aside from the fact that they all lived in the same region, was that all of them, or almost all of them, were called being bitten by a tick. And a lot of them had a mysterious rash right before the symptoms presented.
22:14 Josh Clark? So it came to this guy, Willie Bergdorfer's microscope, because they had said, there's something in the ticks here that is creating this disease that we haven't encountered before.
22:26 Speaker 03 That's right. And he had already discovered this bacterium called, how do you pronounce that? Spirachet?
22:35 Josh Clark? Spirakeet.
22:36 Speaker 03 Spirakeet.
22:37 Josh Clark? But a spirakeet is a type of bacteria, and that's what...
22:40 Speaker 03 Spirachet?
22:41 Josh Clark? That's what...
22:42 Speaker 03 Give me the apron.
22:43 Josh Clark? There you go.
22:45 Speaker 03 All right.
22:46 Josh Clark? Spirochet. You just made me think of the older brother Chet in Weird Science.
22:51 Speaker 03 Now go make yourself one, butt wad.
22:55 Josh Clark? Man, that guy had some good quotes.
22:56 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. R.I.P.
22:58 Josh Clark? What, what?
22:59 Speaker 03 Bill Paxton?
23:00 Josh Clark? When?
23:01 Speaker 03 Oh, he died a couple of years ago. Very sad.
23:04 Josh Clark? Are you sure?
23:05 Speaker 03 I'm positive.
23:06 Josh Clark? You're thinking of Bill Pullman.
23:08 Speaker 03 No, Bill Paxton died. It was so sad because I had just listened to his Marc Maron interview and he was like, "After that episode, I'd wanted nothing more than to be Bill Paxton's friend and neighbor."
23:18 Josh Clark? Oh, neat.
23:19 Speaker 03 He just sounded like the best guy and best family man and he passed away way too early.
23:23 Josh Clark? Yeah, really. I did not know about that. I saw Frailty not too many weeks ago. It's still pretty good.
23:30 Speaker 03 Was it the first viewing or?
23:31 Josh Clark? No, no, no. I'd seen it before, but, you know.
23:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, man, great movie.
23:35 Josh Clark? Yeah, but he wrote and I believe directed and starred in it.
23:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, it was so good. I know, love a good Powers Booth casting call.
23:42 Josh Clark? For sure. It was unusual and surprising, but it was perfect.
23:46 Speaker 03 Very good, underrated film. Where are we?
23:49 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah. We were talking about Rocky Mountain, Spotted Fever, Willie Bergdorfer identifying the Spirokeet that was causing Lyme disease.
23:58 Speaker 03 Right.
23:59 Josh Clark? Spirochet.
24:01 Speaker 03 What a dum-dum.
24:02 Josh Clark? No, no. Remember we established we're all smart.
24:06 Speaker 03 He, yeah, so he discovered this, this parakeet.
24:11 Speaker 03 And he was honored by this discovery and naming that thing after himself. That's why it has that interesting name.
24:20 Josh Clark? I get the impression he didn't name it after himself. They named it after him.
24:23 Speaker 03 No, so said they honored him.
24:24 Josh Clark? Oh, no, no, go on.
24:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:26 Josh Clark? Okay. But there's a big difference between him saying, "This thing's called the Bergdorferi bacteria," and somebody saying, "We're gonna name this after you."
24:34 Speaker 03 No, I totally agree.
24:36 Josh Clark? Okay. So Bergdorferi, or Bergdorfer.
24:41 Josh Clark? He figures out what is the basis of Lyme disease, which is great. That's an enormous breakthrough. It establishes that, yes, it is its own thing. It's its own disease. And because it was a bacteria, it's Aspergia, which again, it's a kind of a snake-like shaped bacteria, specific kind that walks like a slinky. Because it was a bacterial infection, the medical establishment said, oh, we got this here. Take some antibiotics. And over, you know, the course of several years, starting in, I think the 90s is when they really started to say, okay, we can cure Lyme disease, especially if we catch it early on, by a two to four week round of antibiotics.
25:23 Speaker 03 Right.
25:23 Josh Clark? Here you go. And they said, case closed. We're the medical establishment. Let's go have a party for ourselves.
25:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, and here's the thing, like, many times, that can take care of the problem. So it's not like they were just lazy and not doing their work. But I think they closed the book a little too soon, and a lot of people do. Because that oral, that round of oral antibiotics, if you catch it early, it can really work. But, and I think they say, what, like nine times out of 10, if you catch it early, then that will, that will work.
25:56 Josh Clark? Right, they're so, they're so persistent with that assertion that if you find a tick on yourself and you live in an area where Lyme disease is known to thrive, if you can't say how long that tick's been on you, they're probably just going to give you that round of antibiotics prophylactically.
26:14 Speaker 03 I wondered about that.
26:16 Josh Clark? Yeah. And, and, and again, like you said, in a lot of cases, and I believe from what I've read, the vast majority of cases, in early-stage Lyme disease, that round of antibiotics should work.
26:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, and they say that if you, and this is from the American Lyme Disease Foundation, quote, "If you live in endemic area, have symptoms consistent with early Lyme disease and suspect recent exposure to a tick, present your suspicion to your doctor so that he or she may make a more informed diagnosis."
26:46 Josh Clark? Right, show up to your doctor and say, "Madam, sir, I would love to present my suspicions to you. Please sit down."
26:53 Speaker 03 Well, they're saying, sort of, still, you still sort of need to be your own advocate. Because it is so hard to diagnose still. Because if you're going on symptoms alone, like we said, there are hundreds of things that share those symptoms. And Lyme disease may not be the first thing they think of.
27:08 Josh Clark? That's a huge problem with Lyme disease. Another huge problem is that the test we use to test for Lyme disease doesn't actually test for the B. burgdorferi bacteria.
27:19 Speaker 03 Right.
27:20 Josh Clark? It tests for the antibodies that should be present in your bloodstream if you have a bacterial infection. Not even specific to that one, but a bacterial infection. The problem is it takes days, if not maybe a week or two, before your body mounts an effective immune response against this infection. So if you find a tick and they give you a test, say, within the first couple of days, it's going to come back negative, even though you very much have a burgdorferi infection. It's going to come back negative because the antibodies haven't been created yet. The other part of the problem is, even if you take a blood test that tests directly for the burgdorferi bacterium, it moves out of the bloodstream really easily and within
28:05 Josh Clark? several days. There's a very brief window of time where you can directly test for the burgdorferi bacteria and find it in a simple blood test.
28:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, you can also get false positives. And they're advocating now for two-tiered testing for confirmation of the diagnosis. So if you get that first positive test, sometimes now you'll get a different test, a Western blot test.
28:30 Josh Clark? Right.
28:30 Speaker 03 That's going to really get more specific to that antibody, not just the general antibodies.
28:35 Josh Clark? Right, so part of the other problem is that a lot, the reason a lot of patient activists and patient advocate groups say, "No, doctors, you're wrong. Like, this is not good enough," is that there's a sneaking suspicion among people who have what's called chronic Lyme or post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome.
28:56 Josh Clark? Is that the round of antibiotics, the two to four week round of antibiotics that seemingly cured the Lyme disease symptoms that you had, actually failed to fully knock out the bacteria that created this infection, this created this Lyme disease in the first place, that it just burrowed further into your body. And because the medical establishment said, "We got it, it's fine, these antibiotics cured it," and didn't go deeper, that bacterial infection is allowed to fester and then present in worse ways later.
29:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, and it's a really big deal because, you know, what will happen is, they'll say, "You're cured, we gave these antibiotics, they worked." But weeks and months and even years later, when people have persistent fatigue and muscle aches and headaches and, you know, like your knee joints hurt, they said like a brain fog can happen. And these are all things that are, I don't want to say generic, but if you walk into your doctor and say, "I feel like I'm fuzzy and have a brain fog and I get headaches and I'm tired," it's sort of a wide, it's hard to pinpoint what's going on.
30:06 Josh Clark? Sure.
30:07 Speaker 03 And they think you're cured of the Lyme disease. So that's where some of the more dismissive, at least from the Lyme disease community, they're saying like, "I have this chronic issue." And they're saying, "But no, there's no such thing as a chronic issue."
30:21 Josh Clark? Right. Well, they're also saying like, "Look, we gave you a test for Lyme disease and you came back negative, you know? We know you had it before, we tested you, we came back positive, we treated it with antibiotics, now we've tested you again and it's coming back negative, you don't have Lyme disease anymore." So there's a huge debate whether the antibiotic course is not enough and that the Lyme disease is persisting elsewhere in the body, and that maybe it's changed its form so that it won't show up on the tests like it should, or there's remnants of it. I saw one article that suggested that...
30:58 Josh Clark? The cell wall from the spirochete, the Bergdorffary spirochete,
31:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:02 Josh Clark? can remain even after the thing's dead.
31:05 Speaker 03 Right.
31:05 Josh Clark? And persist in like joint tissue and cause an immune response there, which would explain this long-term arthritis as like a post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome symptom. Or is it that it converts into an entirely different disease, like an autoimmune disorder?
31:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, some people think that it could trigger an autoimmune response. And the infection's gone. And this is what's happening later on is you have this autoimmune response. It can lead to other things like rheumatic heart disease. I think we, did we cover Guillain-Barre syndrome? Or just talk about it in different episodes?
31:44 Josh Clark? We've talked about it and I think if I remember correctly, it's Guillain-Barre.
31:48 Speaker 03 Guillain-Barre. Give me the apron.
31:50 Josh Clark? I'm pretty sure, yeah. We could both be wearing the apron for this one, though.
31:54 Speaker 03 Well, we'll split it up. I get the lower half.
31:56 Josh Clark? All right.
31:58 Josh Clark? I get the top half. I'm Porky Pigging it.
31:59 Speaker 03 All right, I'm gonna just cover my bits down there.
32:03 Speaker 03 But regardless of what's happening, what people know is that they don't feel right. And it's extremely frustrating
32:10 Josh Clark? Yeah.
32:11 Speaker 03 to feel these symptoms months and years later
32:14 Josh Clark? Yeah.
32:15 Speaker 03 and not be taken seriously in a doctor's office.
32:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, so a lot of people are saying that we, this course of antibiotics shouldn't be two to four weeks. It should be many months.
32:24 Speaker 03 Right.
32:24 Josh Clark? Because you really need to get all of the spirochete out of there or else it's going to persist and you're gonna have big problems. And then the medical establishment is saying like, this, what you're talking about doesn't even exist. So there's a lot of frustration, like you're saying, a big disconnect. And this is something that is probably going to keep playing out, although it seems like it may be on its way out because of the epidemic proportions Lyme is taking now in the United States.
32:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, the statistics are mounting up such that it can't be ignored any longer. Not that it was ignored, but you know, that's probably a harsh statement. But it's being taken way more seriously now.
33:00 Josh Clark? Yeah, so something like, there's an expectation that there's going to be something like 300,000 to 400,000 new cases of Lyme disease in the United States alone.
33:11 Josh Clark? And that 10 to 20% of those patients will end up with chronic Lyme disease.
33:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I spend a fair amount of time hiking around the woods with my dogs and have pulled plenty of ticks off of them and plenty of ticks off of myself. And I have fatigue a lot because I have a four-year-old and every now and then I'm like, do I have Lyme disease?
33:35 Josh Clark? Well, probably not, and here's why.
33:36 Speaker 03 Well, I've never had the bullseye, first of all.
33:38 Josh Clark? Okay, that's a big one, but also the ticks you pull off of your dog, those are dog ticks. They do not transmit Lyme. It's specifically the long-legged or black-legged tick, which is a type of deer tick.
33:51 Speaker 03 Well, but here's the thing, there are plenty of deer ticks in the woods. Are you saying that they, if they would not latch on to a dog and they'd be like, ooh, no?
33:59 Josh Clark? I don't know. I don't know.
34:01 Speaker 03 Because there's deer ticks all over the woods.
34:03 Josh Clark? Sure, there definitely are. I don't know if deer ticks will latch on to a dog. It's entirely possible they won't, since there's such a differentiation between dog ticks and deer ticks. But I do know that dog ticks don't transmit Lyme.
34:16 Speaker 03 Well, I think we should talk about my favorite thing from the ticks episode, and this is one I will lay on people from time to time, is remember how ticks attach themselves?
34:26 Josh Clark? Sure.
34:27 Speaker 03 They just hang out on blades of grass and things and just snap their little claws constantly, just waiting for something to pass by.
34:35 Josh Clark? Yeah, they sense CO2. Right. They sense the CO2 of the mammal that's walking past.
34:41 Speaker 03 So interesting.
34:42 Josh Clark? And Chuck, one thing I read is that somehow the Lyme, Lyme-infected ticks, because they're infected themselves. Lyme resides in like small mammals and rodents as a reservoir.
34:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
34:55 Josh Clark? They're infected, but they don't have symptoms. Ticks get infected with this stuff and they're just passing it along. It's not like they're the ultimate source of Lyme disease.
35:05 Speaker 03 No, ticks are misunderstood. They're really great.
35:07 Josh Clark? Right. But from what I saw, the ticks that are infected with the Lyme bacteria are actually better at finding hosts than non-infected ticks. Like it somehow enables them to be better parasites.
35:22 Speaker 03 That's amazing.
35:22 Josh Clark? Interesting.
35:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, that sounds familiar. Did we? Cover that, or do I just know that? Because I'm smart.
35:27 Josh Clark? I don't. I don't remember. But I do, I remember you talking about in the Ticks episode about how they wave their arms in the air when somebody passed by. And I remember one of our listeners made some art of that. We gotta find it.
35:41 Speaker 03 That's right. And from snapping their little fingers on a blade of grass, to my dog's butt, to my scrotum, it's quite a, it's quite a ride.
35:50 Josh Clark? It's a wild ride.
35:51 Speaker 03 And then to Emily eventually plucking that thing out for me.
35:54 Josh Clark? That's nice.
35:55 Speaker 03 Kinda, that's what marriage is all about, folks.
35:57 Josh Clark? Yep. You just have your forearm thrust across your eyes. You're like, get it out, get it out.
36:03 Speaker 03 Uh, so let's take another break.
36:05 Josh Clark? Okay.
36:06 Speaker 03 And we'll talk a little bit about prevention and then a little bit about some very recent, interesting, uh, wacky things going on in Congress about Lyme disease as a bioweapon.
36:18 Josh Clark? Okay.
36:37 Josh Clark? You know, eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together, and it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next unless something starts to feel off. Because what we eat and how our bodies respond to it is complicated.
36:53 Speaker 04 That's right. From the very first bite, food kicks off a chain reaction, signals moving between the gut, the brain, and the immune system, a constant back and forth we can't see and often don't fully understand. So we want to introduce to you Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from iHeart Ruby Studio. It's hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient Cynthia McFadden. Eating Interrupted explores everything from food allergies and intolerance and why they seem to be on the rise, to how digestion changes as we age, and what it's really like to live with a chronic GI condition.
37:21 Josh Clark? Through personal stories and expert insight, listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect, and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
37:40 Speaker 05 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
37:43 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
37:46 Speaker 04 That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
38:02 Speaker 05 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
38:10 Josh Clark? That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
38:16 Speaker 06 Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.
38:22 Speaker 04 And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
38:25 Speaker 06 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.
38:29 Speaker 05 What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
38:33 Josh Clark? AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.
38:37 Speaker 07 Connecting changes everything. AT&T.
38:52 Josh Clark? Okay, Chuck, you talked about prevention. How do you keep from having to have a tick pulled from your crotch?
38:57 Speaker 03 Don't ever go into Mother Nature. Just stay in your mid-century modern home with tiled floors and don't go into the woods.
39:06 Josh Clark? Sounds delicious.
39:08 Speaker 03 No, I love the woods. You love the woods, right?
39:10 Josh Clark? Yeah.
39:11 Speaker 03 Yeah?
39:12 Josh Clark? I love watching the woods on television.
39:14 Speaker 03 From your mid-century house?
39:15 Josh Clark? No, I do. I love the woods myself.
39:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, I'm just kidding. Get in the woods. But they recommend things like DEET. I don't use that stuff on my own body. But some people will say, "Put that all over your body and put it on your clothes and put it on your socks and shoes."
39:34 Josh Clark? Just walk around spraying a cloud of it around you constantly while you're in the woods.
39:38 Speaker 03 What I do is I just check for ticks.
39:40 Josh Clark? Yeah, a good thing to do, seriously, it looks super dorky, but what do you care? Is to tuck your pant legs into your socks.
39:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, sure.
39:48 Josh Clark? And then when you come out, like, wear light colors too, because you can see the ticks a lot more easily. And then when you come out of the woods... Take your clothes off and take a shower as soon as you can and just inspect yourself. Inspect your groin, your armpits, your scalp. Part of the problem with Lyme disease though is remember you get it from tims. You get it from ticks in the nymph stage.
40:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
40:14 Josh Clark? Which are really, really small. So you've got to check really, really well to see if you have that tick on you.
40:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, and just while you're at it, take off the adult ticks as well.
40:25 Josh Clark? Yeah.
40:25 Speaker 03 Don't leave them.
40:26 Josh Clark? Just leave those on.
40:27 Speaker 03 And check your dogs, you know, you check your dogs under their haunches, like on the armpit of their legs, whatever that's called, their leg pits. Check behind their ears, check under their collars, because ticks are trying to, you know, they're not going to hang out just like on the top of their back. They may start there, but they're going to try and find a place that's dark and warm and out of, out of view.
40:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, I don't mean to say you can't get Lyme disease from an adult, Chuck. It's just that the nymphs are far more likely to feed on a human than an adult is, but a Lyme infected adult tick will transmit.
41:04 Speaker 03 Sure.
41:04 Josh Clark? Lyme to you too, for sure.
41:05 Speaker 03 A very important distinction.
41:07 Josh Clark? Yep.
41:07 Speaker 03 So now we move on to the US Congress. Very recently, about a month ago.
41:13 Josh Clark? End of July, I think.
41:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, there was a US House Rep named Chris Smith, Republican out of New Jersey, who introduced legislation that said, hey, Department of Defense, you should review these claims that I'm seeing that our own Pentagon researched using ticks to spread Lyme disease as a bioweapon in the mid 20th century. I'm reading a lot about this in books and articles that we did research on Plum Island. And we, we, and other insects too, not just ticks, of turning them into bioweapons. And this thing passed. And a lot of this comes from a book. Written by Chris Newby called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons.
41:57 Josh Clark? And this book, like, I think Chris Smith, the representative from New Jersey, said like, "This book really inspired me to take up this legislation." But in the book, Newby basically says, "The government at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, and on Plum Island, New York, before it was turned into an animal disease research center, were doing..."
42:18 Speaker 03 It was an insect disease research center before that, I guess.
42:21 Josh Clark? Right. They were, they were looking into, well, they definitely were doing bio-warfare research there.
42:28 Speaker 03 Early, early 1950s?
42:30 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
42:30 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:30 Josh Clark? But, and then Fort Dietrich, for however long, if they're not still doing it now. But the, they were apparently looking into ticks as delivery systems for biological weapons.
42:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
42:44 Josh Clark? I couldn't find that that is actually verified, but I find that highly believable. But what Newby is saying is, they were doing that research, and then the way we got Lyme disease is whatever research they were coming up with escaped, say, a tick attached to a bird that flew off of Plum Island and landed in the area around Lyme, Connecticut, and these ticks got off and they started to breed and they, they became endemic in this area, and that's where Lyme disease came from. There was actually a biological weapon that was produced and then inadvertently, probably not purposefully, released into the larger population in the Northeast.
43:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, so here's my question. I haven't read the book, but are they saying that, that we created Lyme disease, or that we just weaponized it? Because those are two very different things.
43:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, I don't know what she's saying either, and I think she stops short of saying that, but that it's implied that if you put two and two together, the government was looking into biological warfare and they were talking about, you know, using ticks at some point, and, you know, it's really close to this ground zero of where the tick epidemic began. You put two and two together. That's the impression I have is that she didn't actually come out and say it, but that she lets the reader surmise for themselves, which is the problem.
44:11 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, that's very easy to disprove if she's actually claiming that they created Lyme disease because we just got through saying it was in, who was the mummy?
44:23 Josh Clark? Utsi.
44:24 Speaker 03 It was in Utsi, 5300 years ago.
44:27 Josh Clark? Over in the Alps.
44:28 Speaker 03 Uh, well, true, but it also in the United States. I mean, it came around in the, uh, we first discovered it in 1970s and like several different places. It wasn't just Lyme, Connecticut. They found it in California.
44:41 Josh Clark? Right.
44:42 Speaker 03 And you can't just, that just, it doesn't add up that it would be popping up in all these random places if it escaped from Long Island Sound in 1953.
44:50 Josh Clark? Right. Which I think somebody who subscribed to this conspiracy theory, and it's very much what it is, is a conspiracy theory, that, um, well, then the release wasn't purpose or accidental, it was purposeful.
45:00 Speaker 03 Okay.
45:01 Josh Clark? And that they spread it around the Northeast, California, and then Spooner, Wisconsin, which supposedly is the actual place where the first case of Lyme disease was described in the United States in 1969.
45:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:14 Josh Clark? About six years before this cluster of juvenile arthritis cases popped up in Old Lime, Lyme, and East Hattam.
45:22 Speaker 03 Well, it's a very bad idea if that's what went on because you have to depend on a lot of things, which is, A, these ticks definitely finding their way to, uh, the enemy, uh, B, they attach to the enemy successfully and transmit the disease. And then what does it transmit? A very slow acting disease that will give people headaches and fatigue over the course of a long time.
45:49 Josh Clark? Right. That also produces a one of a kind telltale rash.
45:53 Speaker 03 Right.
45:54 Josh Clark? That tells you supposedly in plenty of time that you have this, um, this disease that needs to be treated with a simple course of oral antibiotics.
46:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it has to be probably in the country. They're not, they don't thrive well in the city.
46:07 Josh Clark? Right.
46:07 Speaker 03 So it's just, it doesn't make a good biological weapon.
46:10 Josh Clark? No. And then again, people who subscribe to this conspiracy theory say, well, They can't all be winners, but maybe it was just something they were experimenting with and it wasn't very good.
46:19 Speaker 03 Trust me, I mean, we've done enough research on stuff our American government used to do and continue to do that. It's not the most outlandish thing in the world.
46:27 Josh Clark? No, it's not. And that's also why Chris Smith, the representative from New Jersey, shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand because it's entirely plausible. It's, yeah, it's not just a complete wacko idea.
46:38 Speaker 03 Right.
46:39 Josh Clark? The other reason Chris Smith shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand is because he is a true Lyme warrior. He introduced other legislation called the TIC Act, and of course he had to make TIC an acronym. That, um, an acronym, not an anachronism.
46:55 Speaker 03 What's it stand for?
46:56 Josh Clark? The TICS: Identify, Control, and Knockout Act. He was really grasping like a tick on a blade of grass with that one. But the, the point is.
47:07 Speaker 03 But knockout's not one word unless you use it as knockout.
47:10 Josh Clark? Well, that's what he's saying, I guess.
47:12 Speaker 03 So it's really the TICOS Act?
47:14 Josh Clark? Um, but it would create an additional $180 million in federal funding for Lyme disease research. Which is sorely needed right now.
47:24 Speaker 03 That's awesome. I didn't know he was such an advocate. That's good.
47:26 Josh Clark? He really is. He hates Lyme disease like, like a lot.
47:33 Speaker 03 I was about to say something, but.
47:34 Josh Clark? I wish I could take a pill that would bulk up my analogy region in my brain.
47:39 Speaker 03 Oh, your analogies are great.
47:40 Josh Clark? What were you gonna say? I wanna know. We can beep it out if you need to.
47:44 Speaker 03 I was gonna get political. I was gonna say he hates ticks like he hates [bleep].
47:49 Josh Clark? Okay.
47:50 Speaker 03 Can we leave that and bleep it?
47:51 Josh Clark? I don't know. We'll find out.
47:52 Speaker 03 All right.
47:53 Josh Clark? So, um, the whole idea that it's a bioweapon, almost certainly not the case, right? 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.
48:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:10 Josh Clark? What, a lot of people are, are saying is, look, it makes sense, like, this conspiracy theory that people would go to that. But on the same, 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 Aon, 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
48:53 Josh Clark? to explain how climate change has created a new world for ticks, and we are now living in it.
49:01 Speaker 03 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.
49:13 Josh Clark? Right.
49:14 Speaker 03 So, like, the EPA officially uses that as a factor and an indicator in determining the impact of climate change now.
49:21 Josh Clark? Right. And so, the whole, the whole basis of this idea is that because of warmer weather, ticks are being killed off in far fewer numbers from, over the winter. So, they're surviving longer. They're, as it gets warmer and warmer, higher and higher up, their range is spreading rather rapidly.
49:39 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
49:40 Josh Clark? And wherever these ticks go, Lyme disease is game to go with them. So, the spread of Lyme disease is, is increasing as the spread of ticks is increasing too. And ticks have gotten totally out of hand in some areas. In that same Aon 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 by 100,000 ticks at once.
50:10 Speaker 03 That's amazing.
50:11 Josh Clark? That never happened before. And now, all of a sudden, it's kind of becoming routine because the ticks aren't dying off in the winter like they're supposed to. And again, it's because of climate change. And then, in the Northeast, Chuck. One of the reasons why there's been this explosion of ticks is because there's been an explosion of deer to support the tick population.
50:30 Speaker 03 Sure, back in the day, there were things like mountain lions and there were predators that would help control the deer population.
50:38 Josh Clark? Yeah, wolves.
50:39 Speaker 03 Wolves, they're even suggesting reintroducing wolves to help control the deer population.
50:43 Josh Clark? Oh yeah, you can bet that's gonna happen. No, really.
50:47 Speaker 03 No, I mean, do you think so?
50:49 Josh Clark? Yeah, totally. Like, if 300,000 people a year are coming down with Lyme in the United States, they're gonna start reintroducing wolves to combat if it has even a half of a chance.
50:59 Speaker 03 I'd be interested to see if that happens.
51:01 Josh Clark? For sure.
51:02 Speaker 03 Because humans are gonna wanna hunt those wolves.
51:04 Josh Clark? Yeah.
51:05 Speaker 03 You know?
51:06 Josh Clark? It just brings it out in us for some reason, huh?
51:09 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, they hunted the mountain lions.
51:12 Josh Clark? Right, but I think that's the idea of, oh, wait a minute, really weird and circuitous bad things happen when we overhunt mountain lions and wolves. Maybe when we reintroduce them, we won't have to, you know, or we won't follow that impulse, we'll just let nature take its course.
51:33 Speaker 03 Right.
51:34 Josh Clark? Who knows? You got anything else, man?
51:36 Speaker 03 I got nothing else.
51:39 Josh Clark? So there's a solution, a round of antibiotics and some wolves, and that'll cure what ails us.
51:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, advocate for yourself still, people.
51:47 Josh Clark? Sure. And the wolves.
51:49 Speaker 03 Be persistent.
51:50 Josh Clark? That's good advice for everything, Chuck.
51:53 Speaker 03 Agreed.
51:54 Josh Clark? Almost everything. There's certainly cases where persistence is not a good idea, but you know what I'm saying, right?
52:00 Speaker 03 I do know.
52:01 Josh Clark? Okay. If you want to know more about Lyme disease, go check out all of the articles there are to read, and again, go check out the Aon article by Mary Beth Pfeiffer, it's really interesting. And since I said it's interesting, that means it's time for listener mail.
52:19 Speaker 03 I'm gonna call this neat story about how great Stuff You Should Know listeners are.
52:23 Josh Clark? Ooh, I like that.
52:24 Speaker 03 From Portland, Maine. Hey, guys. My wife, daughter, and I, all Stuff You Should Know listeners for years, decided last minute to buy tickets to the show while on vacation at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, just a short drive south of Portland. We had nosebleed seats, naturally, because we waited until just an hour before showtime. And that was more than cool by us, and we were totally stoked just to be there, whatever the seats. When we got to our balcony seats, a friendly fellow named Matt approached us, said he had three tickets for orchestra seats, and asked if we'd like them. The tickets were intended for friends of his who were stuck in Labor Day weekend traffic, couldn't make it to the show. Turns out, he'd been scouting the crowd for 40 minutes, looking for a group of three, even enlisting the help of the ushers to find three people together. And
53:08 Speaker 03 we were the first group that he saw. Brief walk downstairs, and there we were, three rows from the stage for the supremely excellent show about podcast topic redacted. Thanks to Matt and his friends being stuck in traffic, we went from not having tickets an hour before showtime to having third row 10 minutes before you guys took stage. We considered it a little piece of true magic. So while I'm confident this lengthy setup in telling you the story is way too long for the air.
53:37 Josh Clark? No.
53:38 Speaker 03 Not true, Richard Clark. The whole family would be forever grateful if you could give Matt and the Connecticut groundskeeper a huge thank you from Rich, Susan, and Emily in upstate New York for sharing those seats with us.
53:49 Josh Clark? That is fantastic. I love our shows, man.
53:51 Speaker 03 It's great. People are so kind. And that is from Richard Clark. Not Dick Clark, but Rich Clark.
53:57 Josh Clark? Oh, that's even better.
53:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:59 Josh Clark? Dick Clark's taken.
54:01 Speaker 03 That's right.
54:01 Josh Clark? And good for Rich Clark for recognizing that, too.
54:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:05 Josh Clark? Thanks for coming to the show, Rich, and bringing in the family. And thank you, Matt, for being such a cool dude. That was very nice of you. I'm utterly unsurprised because our fans are pretty great people.
54:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
54:16 Josh Clark? Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and you can send us a tweet, or an Insta post, or a comment, or what have you, that kind of thing, because all of our social links are there. Or you can just do it the old fashioned way and send an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to [email protected] .
54:41 Speaker 08 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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55:39 Josh Clark? Hosted by Andrew Stratton, these perspectives highlight that life is more than a moment, a condition, or a tough day. Living with a rare disease can be challenging, but it does not define the Voices of VivGart. In these episodes, they share their stories, from diagnosis to working with their care team on their treatment plan. Listen to Voices of VivGart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
56:02 Speaker 04 With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bankguy. Capital One, N-A, Member FDIC. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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