Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
"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...
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!
....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. :)
Ultimate proof that climate change kills!
Heck, it wouldn't even have to attack humans at all - a global rubber-destroying plague would bring civilization to its knees. There's scarcely a machine on the planet that doesn't rely on rubber gaskets to continue functioning, and we wouldn't last long if our machines all suddenly stopped working.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, except for the *slight* matter of scale.
Estimates are that there's between 200,000 and 500,000 cubic miles of ice currently locked up in permafrost. That's a *lot* of ancient bacteria that are going to be rapidly reintroduced to the ecosystem.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>and eventually makes its way onto land.. ...where the results bear a terrifying resemblance to an election year...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The opening of The Northwest Passage is a myth!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
Sounds like a good solution to the Pacific ocean plastic garbage patch though.
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
And can be cured with antibiotics if treated early.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It is a plot from The X Files. Evil alien virus-goo, frozen for tens of thousands of years.
There was a story a few years ago about scientists digging up frozen bodies in the arctic circle that were infected with the 1918 flu (the one that killed a huge percentage of the earth's population) in order to get samples of the virus to study.
I don't know what became of it since though. In that case though it wasn't burried or unearthed by melting - they just became accessible again thanks to more advanced modern technologies for traversing the frozen wastes.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
But it was geographically contained - which is why it never spread further, the mutation effectively neutralized it - and frankly it gave the book a rather anticlimactic ending. All the super-smart scientists fighting to find anything that can fight back against this extra-terrestrial contagion, hoping against hope to figure out some way to treat the infected... and suddenly it downs a fighter jet, has no way to spread further and is harmless to humans (including those already infected).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It's amazing what the past held. Inside the human genome lies, snipped into three separated pieces so it cannot become active the full dna of a virus. An ancient virus - very ancient because it appears to have no living relatives. But what we know about it suggests that, when this virus was active, it may well have been one of the deadliest virusses to ever exist. We know that because it is capable of completely and utterly masking itself from the human immune system. That's why it's there actually - we couldn't survive without it. The genes from that virus are uses by human fetuses to hide from their mother's immune system and avoid being attacked as foreign DNA. This also suggests that it exists throughout the mammal line and has been around as long as internal-birth. Perhaps it was acquired soon after in an evolutionary step that made internal-birth much more reliable, or perhaps it was already there and when the womb-mutation occurred it was easy for evolution to grab it as a solution. The cut up and neutralized virus was probably present in morganocodontid (the first known mammal - from the late Jurassic) but the plague could well have been around much earlier. It could have been plaguing dinosaurs, or even their predecessors.
Now imagine if that thing was reconstituted and escaped today... a virus no immune system can even see let alone develop a response to. Impossible to vaccinate again, impossible to defend against - even anti-virals may not work on it.
And this plague of plagues... is kept like the pieces of a museum fossil in every cell in your body right now.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Good grief....everything is Man's fault.
"Rubber" in this context generally means any of dozens of polymers. Almost no machines use natural rubber, vulcanized or not.
Still, a plague destroying some of the more popular rubber substitutes, like neoprene, could be devastating.
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
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
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.
If all the rubbers were destroyed, wouldn't we have more babies due to that sperm meeting egg thing? As for the "bringing to its knees", that does not cause babies...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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
You'd have to survive nine months without any mechanized agricultural before that started to become a problem. Grocery store's aren't worth much when there's no food to fill them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Well, I suppose if rubber is gone than oral is a good contraceptive, so yeah, bringing civilization to its knees is quite likely, I guess.
One up the shitter and she won't drop a litter.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Ummm, 20 to 30 million (I forget the exact numbers) with a global population of a bit more than a billion. A couple of percent. It may have been the biggest killer in recent history - possibly since the Black Death - but "huge" is probably an overstatement.
I think you might be conflating two stories. Around 2000 an expedition in search of the lost "Franklin" expedition to find the North West Passage (Atlantic to Pacific across Northern Canada) Exhumed a couple of bodies of sailors who died in the expedition's first winter - about 1820 IIRC. (the expedition met a whaling boat next spring and sent back copies of it's charts, logs and reports with them, which is how the rest of the world knew about the graves.) They took samples from the bodies, but were looking for evidence of lead poisoning, not bacterial nasties. (Still fully sterile, contained samples. Anthropologists know that they need to protect themselves from the grave contents, as well as protecting the body from their contamination.)
About the same time, over in Svalbard, someone found sealed ampoules of specimens taken by a doctor treating victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. One of these was opened, that flu strain sequenced, and the results published. I think in Nature - I remember reading the paper.
Stored in a glass ampoule in a hospital store room and forgotten for decades. It's probably in a lab somewhere now - hopefully a high-security lab. But we know that one, and there are antibodies for it "on the shelf". The 1918 strain isn't a big threat now - we know how to manage it. (Not that it was ever an existential threat to the species - a couple of percent death toll only, see above.)
No new technologies - just detailed records-examining, and a decision taken to examine the question. Then some funding.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Thanks, it's always nice to get the fine details from my favorite slashdot scientist (especially when I had them wrong - it's amazing how the mind can muddle related things together that don't belong together sometimes).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
(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.
[Blush]
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
My that's so obnoxious it is excellent. Thank you, sir!