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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.
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".
This was the plot of the beautiful and great game The Talos Principle!
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. (Decontamination is done with either high heat (120 celcius) or some rather nasty chemicals.) Gruinard Island is the most famous example, but there are other cases of dormant anthrax spores "waking up" decades after the original victim, either animal or human, died from infection. Anthrax can also spread by inhalation, touch (if there's an open wound), or ingestion. Let's say one of the reindeer walked by the original corpse and inhaled some spores. Reindeer gets infected. Reindeer herders slaughter reindeer before it shows symptoms and eat the meat. Now they're infected.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
Melting the ice isn't cutting it. We need to start boiling the ice.
Probably the first myth to dispel is that anthrax is some magical thing conjured up by governments for biological warfare. It's not, it's a naturally occurring bacteria, most common in warmer climates of Southern Europe and Africa, but also present in North America too. It's typically carried by animals, both through contact, and through ingestion (which in turn allows it to be transmitted from prey, to predator), and of the roughly couple of thousand natural cases of human infection that occur across the world every year, many are in people working in industries such as tanning - i.e. working with infected animal hides.
Part the reason this natural bacteria was chosen for weaponisation was precisely it's resilience, and it's ease of infection, coupled with it's relatively high fatality rate. It shouldn't be surprising therefore that an animal carcass frozen in ice could still infect someone given it's properties of resilience, infection, and the fact that animal carcasses are exactly where you would most likely encounter it in the first place.
Given this, I'm intrigued to know if you still think it's ridiculous, and if so, why?
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 *
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