Soil-borne anthrax is very common; there's in fact "anthrax season" when (usually small) outbreaks happen among wild and farmed animals, from North America to southern Africa, Russia to China and India. (Search for anthrax on https://www.promedmail.org/, there are 37 reports in 2017 so far.) That a thawed carcass was infected is an interesting anecdote as far as the mode of the transmission, but it isn't surprising. That is, it's not a disease that we've eradicated that is coming back to haunt us.
Thanks for this. This isn't the first article I've seen that tried to make tenuous connections between climate change (née global warming) and all manner of horrible, immediate effects. The environmentalist crowd gets frustrated that most people consider their cause to be a far off problem that everyone currently living won't have to bear the burden of, and they use articles like this to try to create fear of immediate consequences in order to advance their agenda. I like to read facts, not speculation created by masters of fearmongering.
The comments on this article are fascinating and why I love reading the HackerNews. Point vs point debates about interesting scientific theory but in a way that average person like me can understand. I used to read about this kind of conversation happening in the late 19th Century in the bars of Royal Science institutions in Europe - it feels a little bit like that. :)
Strange, I'm the exact opposite. Reading all this conjecture makes me cringe. I don't know yet if I should consider that a personal failing, or just accept it.
My wife always bugs me about the cold. I tell her operating rooms are cold. Heat = entropy, disease vector increase. Any thawing of permafrost will start to revive dormant diseases, viruses and flora. We might as well complete the trifecta and start looking for ancient DNA and revive long gone species for the win. She always tells me cold and drafts = sick, but if you look where the percent of currently diseased - its never in the north - always in tropical places where diseases, worms, parasites have a field day. There will be a day where she'll be begging for the cold :)
I believe they figured out that there is some truth to the idea that cold=sick at least for influenza. It doesn't live long while airborne but in a cold environment it can survive a bit longer, meaning in a warm room if someone sneezes you are less likely to be exposed than in a cold one.
The main causal link I have seen between common cold and temperature is that some common cold virus develop in the nasal cavity but need a temperature closer to 30 degrees than our typical body temperature to prosper.
There are quite a few sci-fi novels and one show I saw that feature nightmare scenarios based off of thawing ice. I seriously doubt we will see something catastrophic though. It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.
The Red Queen hypothesis suggests that the struggle between organisms and their parasites involves a constant reshuffling of offensive and defensive strategies, so it may be entirely possible that, if one of the bacterial/viral species released were originally adapted to infecting mammals or even our ancestral primates, they could target a pathway that humans (or more likely, some subset of humans) have stopped defending because modern parasites don't currently target that pathway.
It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.
Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.
> It's been a while since I took bio but bacteria/viruses from thousands if not millions of years ago will most likely not be able to bind to our cells.
I'll just add this to my list of things that I probably should give some thought, but won't because the top of the list includes refugee crisis, income inequality, and all the less Crightonesque consequences of climate change.
I'm not saying this isn't a threat. But it doesn't seem as scary as the title or comments are making it out to be. The article admits that most bacteria can't survive this long frozen. Only certain types that have adapted to serving in the cold long term by forming spores. It only mentions one bacteria that harms humans that can do that, botulinum. Which isn't contagious and is only a problem with improperly canned food. And anthrax which is deadly but fortunately not very contagious.
Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...
Diseases from early humans are an interesting point of worry. What tends to make a deadly disease deadly is that it is able to infect us, but is poorly adapted to us. A disease that is adapted to a close relative of ours is likely to both infect us and not be well-adapted to modern humans.
When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"?
Bacteria, could be a positive well.
Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.
I'm not a microbiologist but when accounting for evolution, you'd think that a microbe which was locked away in ice for millions of years would be maladapted to modern animals - Particularly in terms of transmission between hosts.
I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.
Doesn't this work both ways though, where modern animals would not be well equipped to defend against a microbe that has been locked away for millennia?
Read the 'Drowned World' by J.G. Ballard, humans start having ancient dreams.
'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.
Revel with me in the thought that we —humans— think we are center of the world.
That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet.
But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial.
And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us.
Except that, on it's current trajectory, humanity will very shortly conquer all known challenges that earth offers. Even death itself is solvable given effort and time. We do share this spaceship with many other lifeforms, but we really are the ones taking the helm.
It wouldn't surprise me if humanity chose to restore earth to something like the state it was in before the industrial age.
This sounds like a very manageable threat. We already have systems in place to identify and control the spread of diseases. It's already equipped to deal with new or rare diseases. This will be an added burden but probably no more difficult than dealing with something like ebola. Likely easier due to the geography and population density involved.
> From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them
We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.
> That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance.
If you take into account the infection of native Americans compared to Europeans since the 15th to 19th century [0] you'd infer that some ethnic stratum really evolved a lot of resistance wrt. to smallpox.
Conversely, because of smallpox eradication I would guess that some part of the population probably regressed on that.
The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.
In a way, we did evolve to acquire the brainpower —and invent the tooling and the methods— with which we managed to discover the vaccines and cures to effectively eradicate the diseases.
We have evolved to resist if we assume our intelligence is an extension to our body, and intelligently managing diseases is an extension to our immune system.
I guess I prefer that they stay there... but can't help but to say that it seems fascinating that there are these dormant antique lifeforms just waiting to be discovered. Hope they don't kill us.
This has been happening for at least a couple of hundred years. Mammoth bodies have been exposed in Siberia since at least the 18th century and probably much further back than that.
[+] [-] zbjornson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autokad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secfirstmd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bendbro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mickrussom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exhilaration|9 years ago|reply
Here's a more recent article that cites some papers: https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent...
[+] [-] hinkley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AckSyn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arctangent|9 years ago|reply
It's a fairly good TV show on this topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)
[+] [-] Jaruzel|9 years ago|reply
It's a great show, and without spoiling is on-topic for this subject. Season 2 is a bit out there, but I really recommend people watch it.
[+] [-] enknamel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _nothing|9 years ago|reply
It'd be sort of like airport security letting through someone with a blowgun because they're trained to look for modern guns.
Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite or there would sell be some subset of humans with a resistance that they could spread to the rest of the population, but that's not always a given.
[+] [-] wavegeek|9 years ago|reply
When the white man arrived in South America and in Australia the diseases they carried devastated native populations.
Even though in the case of Australia they had been separated for over 50,000 years.
HIV came from chimpanzees - evolutionary distance 5 Million years.New influenza strains regularly come from chickens and pigs.
So what you are saying is complete nonsense.
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurcolle|9 years ago|reply
Famous last words
[+] [-] fhood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjakubowski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easilyBored|9 years ago|reply
If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight
[+] [-] zouhair|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|9 years ago|reply
Viruses are more of a concern, but the article doesn't make a great case there either. They mention that scientists found a smallpox victim but were unable to recover a complete smallpox virus. Just fragments of it's DNA. The scariest thing recovered was Spanish Flu. Which fortunately many people have already been vaccinated against: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-flu-vaccine-idUSTRE65E65S2...
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...
[+] [-] btilly|9 years ago|reply
Which could be really, really bad.
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|9 years ago|reply
When you consider, for example, the Zika virus and it's effect on the human brain, perhaps - on the other hand - we have a virus to thank for making homo sapiens more intelligent than our then "competition"?
Bacteria, could be a positive well.
Of course it's a roll of the dice either way. C'est la evolution.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
I would be more afraid of pathogens that were frozen more recently.
[+] [-] GordonS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fomite|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmdrfred|9 years ago|reply
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-o...
[+] [-] whoisstan|9 years ago|reply
'Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, Millennium 1999, p. 41.
[+] [-] raulk|9 years ago|reply
That Earth is made for us and we have the power to shape it in whichever way we wish. That we own the planet.
But, in reality, we don't. We are here only temporarily. There are powerful organisms hiding out there who are perennial.
And they act like guards. If we push it too far, we set off the right conditions for them to spring to life, and restore balance on Earth by anhililating the threat — i.e. us.
What a time to be alive!
[+] [-] staunch|9 years ago|reply
It wouldn't surprise me if humanity chose to restore earth to something like the state it was in before the industrial age.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|9 years ago|reply
Who's in charge of what constitutes balance?
[+] [-] adrianN|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
We have antibiotics for plague, and vaccination / eradication for small pox. That doesn't feel like we evolved any resistance. A couple of thousand cases of plague are reported to WHO each year.
[+] [-] badosu|9 years ago|reply
If you take into account the infection of native Americans compared to Europeans since the 15th to 19th century [0] you'd infer that some ethnic stratum really evolved a lot of resistance wrt. to smallpox.
Conversely, because of smallpox eradication I would guess that some part of the population probably regressed on that.
The spread of disease from European contact was not always accidental. Europeans arriving in the Americas had long been exposed to the diseases, attaining a measure of immunity, and thus were not as severely affected by them. Therefore, disease could be an effective biological weapon.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
[+] [-] raulk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|9 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050325234239.h...
[+] [-] pesfandiar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuffedBelly|9 years ago|reply
The Thaw http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1235448/
[+] [-] muninn_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccvannorman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcam|9 years ago|reply