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Dormant Diseases Frozen In the Ice Are Waking Up (bbc.co.uk)
boley1 writes: Like a plot from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) movie, evil is waking up as permafrost melts due to weather or natural, man-made, local, and/or global climate change. (Take your pick of any or all -- doesn't matter -- the plot and result is roughly the same.) According the the BBC, a 12-year-old boy died and at least twenty people were hospitalized after being infected by a disease (anthrax) that lay buried in the ice for 75 years. "The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost," reports BBC. "There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed." In this case, bringing back the disease was accidental, but the story goes on to give examples of scientists (no indication of whether they are mad or not) purposefully seeing what ancient bacteria and virus they can resurrect from the ice. How many more diseases are lurking in the ice? Will The Andromeda Strain be released by meddling scientists or global warming?
to die horribly in this sci-fi movie. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sure, he got it from anthrax from a 75-year old reindeer. Ridiculous.
as the Andromeda Strain evolves to eat a specific formulation of rubber only present in fighter pilot masks.
Little different than digging in mines, exploring caves. Or archaeology digs. Or deep sea exploring.
It just sounds "cool" because --- you know --- ice!
And frozen mosquito with dinosaur DNA. Preserved wooly mammoth. And such.
Come ON, Slashdot.
Anthrax isn't a "dormant disease." There's live anthrax running around all over the place. It's not some ancient disease that's suddenly re-emerging because of global warming. What nonsense.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Fromt his link That’s because something went terribly wrong a couple of decades ago, when the melting of the permafrost released a long-dormant alien virus into the oceans. That virus is capable of mutating any species it comes into contact with, which leads to an initial wave of horrific aquatic creatures, reminiscent of Terror From The Deep, and eventually makes its way onto land..
You (and the BBC) want me to be freaked out because Permfrost is melting. Yet:
"The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost,"
Ok, so either 75 years ago it was melted enough for the reindeer to sink in, or the permafrost that is melting is a mere 75 years old, not thousands of years old as the name "permafrost" is meant to imply.
Any time someone is proclaiming doom now I look for the agenda behind it - and sadly these days it is always there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Announcer: [ over SUPER ] "One hundred thousand years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse. In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thawed out. He then went to law school and became.. Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.
Jingle: "He used to be a caveman,
but now he's a lawyer.
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer!"
Announcer: Brought to you by.. Gas Plus - actually gives you gas, for those times when you feel like being the joker; and by National Escort Services - if we don't get a prostitute to your door in 15 minutes, you don't pay; and by Happy Fun Ball - still legal in 16 states - it's legal, it's fun, it's Happy Fun Ball! And now, tonight's episode of "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer".
[ open on interior, courtroom, the Judge banging her gavel ]
Judge: Mr. Cirroc, are you ready to give your summation?
Cirroc: [ stepping out] It's just "Cirroc", your Honor.. and, yes, I'm ready. [ approaches the jury box ] Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?" I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know - when a man like my client slips and falls on a sidewalk in front of a public library, then he is entitled to no less than two million in compensatory damages, and two million in punitive damages. Thank you.
Judge: The jury will now retire to deliberate.
Jury Foreman: [ standing ] Your Honor.. we don't need to retire. Cirroc's words are just as true now as they were in his time. We give him the full amount.
[ the jury applauds Cirroc ]
Judge: Did you hear that, Mr. Cirroc?
Cirroc: [ cell phone to his ear ] Hang on a second.. [ to the judge ] I-I'm sorry, your Honor. I was listening to the magic voices coming out of this strange modern invention! [ smiles maliciously to the camera ]
Announcer: This has been "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer". Join us next week for another episode. Here's a scene. [ cut to Cirroc and his caveman family standing before a podium at a political rally ]
Cirroc: Thank you! Thank you very much, thank you! First of all, let me say how happy I am to be your nominee for the United States Senate! [ applause ] You know.. thank you.. I don't really understand your Congress, or your system of checks and balances.. because, as I said during the campaign - I'm just a caveman! I fell on some ice, and later got thawed out by scientists. But there is one thing I do know - we must do everything in our power to lower the Capitol Gains Tax. Thank you!
Announcer: Next time, on "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer".
Wouldn't The Thaw be a more appropriate move reference?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
We are all doomed! Doomed!
It gives us a chance to eradicate some of these ancient diseases for good.
Rather than going "Locked in the ice. Too much trouble!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is just diseases being frozen for a while, no where near to True AI.
We will never have true AI.
Fortitude is the almost scientifically sound TV show you should be watching
Well that's the background story in the videogame "The Talos Principle", warming permafrost releases an ancient virus that infected primates in the distant past and kills off humanity too quickly for a vaccine to be created.
is normally found in soil and can survive there for years. So, meh.
"It is believed to have spread from reindeer."
Right. So, they don't actually know what has been acting as a reservoir for the disease. This is similar to Ebola (pick a strain): the reservoir is bats! No, it's monkeys! No, it's in the water! Wait...
"Help, the ice caps are melting!", and other fairy tales for progressive children.
So the stuff that is melting was not around 75 years ago, how much methane is that going to release exactly? Considering it spent much of the time frozen, not decomposing?
Or if it was melted before and then froze why would it release a lot of methane now it did not before?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally, I'm hopeful that the permafrost will evaporate, and we'll have giant lizard monsters with lime jello tails roaming the streets. Just think how delicious that would be.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
This was the plot of the beautiful and great game The Talos Principle!
We are the voice of the new generation. We are the voice of the new people. The destructive ways of the past are gone. We will replace them with our vision of the future. The Party will lead us to the new age. There have been those who have tried to stop the new age. They are the corrupt reminder of the past. They have tried to confuse us with the idea that the old America was a good country. We know that lie. History teaches us that lie. We are grateful to our Soviet brothers who saved the world from destruction, and we can now join them in a world of socialist brotherhood. Everyone will go to school, everyone will have a job, everyone will be equal. No one will exploit or be exploited, and all those who oppose this wonderful vision will be crushed.
Welcome to the future, comrade!
one of these was heard saying feck off , i was sleeping now ya gone done woke me
Soon.
....re-animate upon entering the earth, maybe a virus travelling on an asteroid can survive too. It's possible that some of the pandemics that have plagued this planet came from space since the illness occurred across several continents near instantaneously. Just saying we all are always going to experience such risks whether from this planet or elsewhere. Just maintain your health and hopefully your own immune system will be strong enough to survive the onslaught. :)
BeauHD is publishing clickbait again. What a shocker!
Ultimate proof that climate change kills!
It's a disease. It's around. There are over two thousand cases every year. We know about it, and how to deal with it - yes, it's a dangerous disease (depending on the form you get, mortality can be anywhere from 20-80% without treatment, and it can be as high as 80% with treatment for the more severe - respiratory - infections), but it's still a known quantity.
What scares the living daylights out of me is the possibility of a resurgence of smallpox. We (speaking globally, that is) haven't routinely vaccinated against smallpox in over thirty years (Europe and the USA in over forty years). That's a hell of a lot of people that will get sick if that disease gets back out in the wild again and we don't react quickly enough in ramping up production, distribution, and administration of the vaccine. (Not me - I'm old enough to have been vaccinated as a baby - but still.)
This is the dumbest thing ever. We know anthrax is still around! Now it's the climate. Ridiculous
Melting the ice isn't cutting it. We need to start boiling the ice.
The BBC article does not say it "became trapped", the summary mis-quotes the BBC.
This was 1941, those will be buried contaminated carcasses from the 1941 outbreak. They didn't fall over and get covered with ice. The got rounded up into a pit, shot and covered over in the ice.
This was really close to the premise for a really good episode of the X-Files. The episode was called Ice and was one of the early episodes in season 1. It involved a parasitic worm that had been frozen deep in the Arctic ice but was released during the process of drilling ice cores. It was basically the X-Files' version of The Thing. Although it didn't involve melting ice, the first season episode Darkness Falls had a similar premise. In that episode, tiny bugs were released by logging in the Pacific Northwest, which swarmed in the darkness and desiccated any humans who were present. Neither of these are quite the same as what the article discusses, but they made for a couple of really entertaining hours of TV.
Which strain of anthrax was it in Siberia ?
Me,I've already had anthrax as a kid in the 1960's,supposedly caught from bulls imported from France,but just as likely as part of an experiment run from porton down reasearch establishment,so I'm safe from some strains of it..
How many other kids do you know of that spent months on end in old army barracks used as isolation units because they had tonsilitis,when in those days most kids had their tonsils whipped out after one or two infections ?
We lived in the right place at the right time and had the right contacts to have been used as un-official,illegal test subjects...
Hardly alarmism, when they have an example case. Albeit from a human made, 1941 mass cull and burial of animals to control an outbreak of Anthrax. It's still a case of a permafrost that they once believed would be forever, gone.
Not just gone, but its 35 degree heat wave in Siberia right now. That's gone with a fooking vengence.
SuperKendall makes the claim its all an agenda, well yeh, Superkendall does that for all global warming articles.
And the conclusion is of course not to live near ice!
Luckily the ice caps have not melted away the dorment alien eggs that the predators have come to destroy.
... during the history of the earth, potentially killing some species. Maybe it also killed a species that would otherwise have prevented mankind from evolving. Who knows.
Norwegian TV series Fortitude revolves around the consequences to a remote arctic village when a newly-thawed mammoth is found, dead, but its parasites not. Highly recommended.
Welcome to 'Climatedot'. Why not just rename the site and have done with it?
Also most telling you are not correcting other people who really do not seem to know what permafrost means.
I don't know about you, but most of us are not paid to comment on /. Apologies for the spotty service, but we have to earn our daily bread in another way, and that takes time.
Sure, he got it from anthrax from a 75-year old reindeer. Ridiculous.
I propose a theme song for this movie: Reindeer got run over by a permafrost! Do be do be do do do do do
We'll make great pets
It is a plot from The X Files. Evil alien virus-goo, frozen for tens of thousands of years.
Hopefully one is a mutagen that will turn me into the Hulk!
Since there has been no global warming in 15+ years, and the ice cap (in latest studies) is growing in the Arctic and Antarctic, this is not a serious concern.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3498622/
Good grief....everything is Man's fault.
Little different than digging in mines, exploring caves. Or archaeology digs. Or deep sea exploring.
It just sounds "cool" because --- you know --- ice!
Well, ice is literally cool.
That does make a difference.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"More idiotic click-bait (Score:5, Informative)"
Should have been moderated -1, stupid.
An interesting story. Sorry you aren't interested in biological news, but nevertheless, it's an interesting story related to science and technology and appropriate to a news website
Anthrax isn't a "dormant disease."
Anthrax isn't a "dormant disease." This particular anthrax outbreak, however, was from anthrax dormant while frozen in permafrost.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I don't think this is clickbait. However, I suspect that the concerns in the article are a bit overblown. Viruses are often highly specific in the hosts that they target, meaning that viruses that were formant in the permafrost might have a hard time finding suitable hosts in the present day.
Well, anthrax is a bacterium, not a virus. The whole point of this story is that the thawed anthrax did infect humans.
It may sound far-fetched, but it's possible. Anthrax spores are ridiculously hardy under natural conditions and can survive in their dormant state for years.
And it happens all the time, mostly outside the cities. Anthrax is also called "wool sorter's disease" and several other names. The spores are very hardy and can survive centuries of "ordinary' harsh environments. Changes in weather on a decade scale, which in "good years" bring vegetation and browsing animals to areas that are only intermittently fertile, can also bring an anthrax outbreak, resulting form an animal visit an infected site.
This is nothing new. It happens that it's currently a rare thing in the US (where it happens only a couple times a year - low compared to 16 cases of Bubonic Plague in 2015) and Northern Europe. But country folk are aware of it and take precautions. Anthrax, though very serious, is susceptible to antibiotics. The common form of the infection is a characteristic skin lesion (from a spore carried into a skin break), which is easy to diagnose and relatively benign (i.e. only one-in-five die if not treated, as opposed to about half WITH treatment for a Respiratory (inhaled spore) case, or a quarter to two-thirds for gastrointestinal (ate contaminated vegies or diseased meat).
(I heard of one case - not sure if it was anthrax or another long-term spore-forming disease - where someone doing a major cleanup of a historic house where people with the disease had been treated decades before - was apparently exposed when scraping the dirt out from between the cracks of the floorboards.)
Because it's almost unheard of in cities it's a great opportunity for global-warming alarmists to gin up another panic, now that they've got a case they can blame on melting ice. If they can get that meme going they can then yell about global warming at each good-weather outbreak - which means several times a year.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Its evolution. As species evolves to combat disease the diseases in turn adapt in order to not die out; the strains adapt and change according the environment and over time become more resilient just as we have for example. Any harmful critters released from 10,000 years ago have not undergone the same evolutionary process as their more potent cousins of today and would be discarded by our immune system post haste. There is nothing to fear here.
We need a good gene pool cleanse
Plus the fact that anything in caves or underground has been actively interacting with the surface the entire time, while frozen microbes have been in stasis, unaffected by the passage of time, so that deadly plagues of the distant past, that we've long since lost resistance to, could be suddenly reintroduced.
I'm not all that worried about the revival of ancient diseases from melting permafrost wiping out all mammals, or even all humanity.
For starters, our ancestors already managed to survive them already. I'm far more concerned with the ongoing evolution of new diseases (such as ebola) in the portion of the biosphere that is actively evolving.
As for "not interacting" with the world in an ongoing way, frozen stuff from the far past is constantly being reintroduced as the melting ends of glaciers re-expose stuff that was frozen for millennia.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Andromeda Strain was a satellite sample return mission gone wrong. It was from outer space, not Arctic ice.
I don't know about you, but most of us are not paid to comment on /.
You never post to Slashdot while at work?
Liar.
I wonder what else you've been laying about...
I don't get paid, I've been on Slashdot correcting idiots for free for decades now. It's a public service that I offer the world. And the proof of what I say lies in the fact that when I post a correction like my two reasonable questions, you have no answers - only insults. Thank you yet again for proving me right, example #1,000,049.
I'll let you have the last word since you've shown your word is worthless.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look at BitZtream getting pwned!
Both the OP and the Slashdot editors don't know a damn thing about what The Andromeda Strain was about; it was about an alien organism, not anything Earth-evolved that was buried under ice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sci...
"SPAULDING!!!"
1. Pro tip, don't poke rotting corpses exposed by melting ice.
2. Bacteria and viruses exposed by melting snow (supposedly under sunny conditions) don't last very long under the UV bombardment, so even if the Andromeda Strain does get released, it will most likely be destroyed by UV radiation long before it can infect someone.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Because it's almost unheard of in cities it's a great opportunity for global-warming alarmists to gin up another panic, now that they've got a case they can blame on melting ice. If they can get that meme going they can then yell about global warming at each good-weather outbreak - which means several times a year.
......melting ice? 'Each good weather outbreak?
For you I have one word:
PERMAfrost. Work it out yourself.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
... some guerilla marketing for the series "Fortitude"? 'Cause it sounds an awful lot like that show's plot.
(My emphasis.)
It's not particularly remote. The Yamal peninsula is just NE of the northern end of the Ural mountains, which are traditionally taken as the eastern border of Europe. And with the region's warming over the last few (and next many) decades, it's goign to get less remote.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There was a plot arc in the Canadian Sci-Fi series ReGenesis about a Spanish Flu outbreak coming from a frozen body.
ReGenesis was a very good series, one of the few TV that included at least some hard science. It's hard to find. I had to Torrent it.
Anthrax is common in soils which is why every so,often a creature comes down with it and when it is discovered a herd might be put down to prevent further spread.the fact that the anthrax as seen to ge sourced from a frozen cadaver is minor though interesting as in the north there are few sources of soil and so essentially the best way to spread this disease is through organic residues like a dead animal frozen and coming out of permafrost.
Anthrax is common in soils which is why every so,often a creature comes down with it and when it is discovered a herd might be put down to prevent further spread.the fact that the anthrax as seen to ge sourced from a frozen cadaver is minor though interesting as in the north there are few sources of soil and so essentially the best way to spread this disease is through organic residues like a dead animal frozen and coming out