Unpopular Science 230919 Lyme Disease

If COVID was a lab leak, what about other diseases?

We briefly mentioned Lyme Disease in Personal Science Week - 230629, linking to a report that predicted this year would see historically heavy outbreaks of the disease. Statistics aren’t available on whether or not that turned out to be true, but it’s time to delve more deeply into why the disease seemed to come out of nowhere in 1968, initially confined to a tiny part of New England from which it has expanded rapidly ever since.

Now that it’s safe to discuss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 might have originated in a tragic lab leak, is it okay to consider that other infectious diseases could also be the result of scientific research gone bad?