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?

Comments

Thinking Things Through

[SuperKendall]

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.

Happens all the time. Just not in big cities.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.