Is it true that encephalitis ticks were brought to the Far East by Japanese saboteurs?

According to the widely circulated version, the dangerous disease, which affects several thousand people in Russia every year, is nothing more than a biological weapon, once used by its eastern neighbor to slowly exterminate the population of Russia. We checked if this is true.

Here are the details you can read about this on a number of information sites: “Encephalitis was not known to the pioneers of Siberia and settlers in the Far East until the 1930s. In the 1920s, an epidemic occurred in Japan, killing several thousand people. The virus was transmitted by a mosquito. This may have been the first biological weapon test using insects. But the mosquito is too dangerous and an unpredictable spreader of a deadly disease. Therefore, the Japanese militarists chose a slower but surer method of carrying the virus - a tick, widespread in the Far Eastern and Siberian taiga.

In 1937, an epidemic of an unknown disease began among soldiers of the Far Eastern group of the Red Army, often leading to death. A special expedition of military microbiologists under the leadership of Professor Zilber was urgently sent from Moscow. It was they who discovered the virus and its carrier, the tick. Almost immediately they began to blame the Japanese military. But there was no evidence. Only after World War II did it become known about the existence of the notorious “Detachment 731” of the Kwantung Army on the territory of Manchuria, which had been conducting experiments with biological weapons since 1933. It was in that year, by the way, that our doctor Panov, for the first time in the USSR, made a clinical description of a new disease in the Far East, later called tick-borne encephalitis. In 1945, after the USSR entered the war with Japan, by order of the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Otazo Yamada, the secret military camp of microbiologists was destroyed. However, it was not possible to hide all traces of the crime: the testimony collected in this case was included in the materials of the Khabarovsk trial of Japanese war criminals in 1949. In Japan, the epidemic of mosquito-borne encephalitis was suppressed and completely eliminated. In the USSR and Russia, tick-borne encephalitis turned out to be a ticking time bomb. In the 1960s, the infected tick crossed the Yenisei, in the 1980s it crawled across the Urals and is currently found throughout Russia.”

In one form or another, the main ideas from this text are shared by resources such as "Arguments and Facts", inpearls.ru, "Pravo.ru", Neuronus.com and other sites. The same point of view was expressed by the famous Russian economist, politician and publicist Mikhail Delyagin in one of the radio broadcasts "Komsomolskaya Pravda".

Tick-borne encephalitis is a viral infection that is characterized by fever, intoxication and damage to the gray matter, and sometimes the membranes of the brain and spinal cord. In a significant percentage of cases, the disease leads to persistent neurological and psychiatric complications (sometimes incurable), but deaths are also common.

People and animals become infected with this virus due to tick bites. At the same time, the encephalitis tick is not a biological species at all, as many people think, but only a designation of an infected individual. The reservoir and vector of infection are ixodid ticks, of which more than 15 species are distinguished, but only two are of epidemiological significance: Ixodes perculcatus (taiga) and Ixodes ricinus (European). Ticks are active during two periods of the year: May-June and August-September. As they say scientists, depending on a number of factors, from 2% to 6% of people bitten can get sick from an infected individual.

One such factor is geography. There are three types of the virus: 1) Far Eastern - the most virulent (can cause severe forms of the disease), 2) Siberian - less virulent, 3) Western - the causative agent of two-wave encephalitis (causes non-severe forms of the disease).

We are obviously interested in the Far Eastern virus - not only because of its deadly effect, but also because the conspiracy theory (if it is true) should be dedicated to it.

Indeed, the discovery of the tick-borne encephalitis virus took place in the 1930s in the Far East. The first theoretical description of the infection, singling it out among its own kind, was given by a Soviet neurologist Alexander Panov in 1935. Then, in 1937–1939, an epidemic of spring-summer tick-borne encephalitis was confirmed, and its comprehensive research began in the Far East by expeditions of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR. In 1937, during an autopsy of a deceased patient, virologist Mikhail Chumakov got infected tick-borne encephalitis (cutting a bone), which ultimately resulted in a severe chronic illness that lasted for life until 1993. The fate of his immediate superior, Lev Zilber, who was the first to isolate the dangerous virus, was no better. Soon Zilber was accused in an attempt to poison the Moscow water supply with this infection (which in itself is absurd - tick-borne encephalitis is not transmitted through water) and was exiled to the north in camps. Only in 1944, with the intercession of prominent figures, among whom was the writer Veniamin Kaverin, Zilber’s brother, the virologist was freed.

There was also the infamous Japanese "Unit 731", who actually conducted experiments with biological weapons, which ultimately led to the death of more than one hundred people. Many books have been written about him, dozens of films have been made, so we will not dwell on his history in detail. Another thing is important - the two above-mentioned historical realities do not fit well with each other. How notes virologist, Honored Doctor of Russia Vadim Reznik, the specialists of “Detachment 731” developed “bacteriological weapons using pathogens transmitted by airborne droplets, through water or with the help of fleas and rodents. We are talking about typhus, plague, cholera. Perhaps about Japanese encephalitis. It, unlike the tick-borne one, is transmitted by mosquitoes. Isolated cases of Japanese encephalitis have been reported in Southern Primorye. But due to the cold climate, the type of insect that carries this disease does not survive in the Russian Far East.” It is no coincidence that the official name of the detachment was Main Directorate for Water Supply and Prevention of Kwantung Army Units. At the same time, the main activity of the detachment unfolded after 1936, when it was integrated to the Kwantung Army. Let us remember that tick-borne encephalitis was first described a year earlier.

And finally, more than ten years ago, biologists from the Ural State University installed origin of tick-borne encephalitis virus. As it turned out, it took root in the Urals 400 years ago with the beginning of active colonization of Siberia. The disease was brought from a natural source by animals that accompanied man along his trade routes, and then it reached at least the Baltic states.

Thus, there is no serious reason to assume that the tick-borne encephalitis virus was planted in Soviet Russia by Japanese saboteurs. It should be noted that Western conspiracy theorists suspect Another dangerous disease of anthropogenic origin is Lyme disease, which is also carried by ixodid ticks. But this is still nothing more than a dubious theory.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. A. D. Ammosov. Tick-borne encephalitis.
2. Ural biologists have established the origin of the tick-borne encephalitis virus
3. Tick-borne encephalitis virus subtypes emerged through rapid vector switches rather than gradual evolution