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 article used anthrax as an example for a mechanism that could become more prevalent as more permafrost thaws. This mechanism is neither speculation nor a tenuous connection. It's fact. It is also a fact that global warming makes permafrost thaw.
On the whole, this is not an alarmist article at all. It merely explains some potential risks based on the findings of serious scientists.
Do you have anything to add to the discussion other than pure speculation, fearmongering and conspiracy theories regarding the motivations of the authors and scientists?
It may be true that this article is overblown, but let's not pretend that the science for climate change and global warming is not rock solid, even if we can't predict the exact extent of the damage.
Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
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.
I'm somewhere in between. When an article gets posted about something you have deep up to date knowledge of, you realize how inaccurate the comments here are in the details. To the point of damaging in some cases.
In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :)
But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects.
Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
I'm with you. Educated comments are rare. The only good articles are HN are business advice. Rest, including technology is fanboyism, conjectures and one-upmanship.
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 :)
Makes sense to me. A lot of bodily fluids sit right on the line between "gel" and "liquid" at room temperature. And gels promote biofilm formation. A few degrees too cool and all your externally-exposed fluids are now gels all the time.
Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out.
Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria.
I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
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.
There's also the thought that evolutionary adaptations are so tightly coupled with environmental landscape that it'd primarily work the other way around. For whatever defense mechanism we lack for that particular parasite, they lack anything to combat their own million-year-more-efficient predators (like our immune system). It is less about evolution moving forward and being more 'advanced', and more about evolution ensuring an efficient equilibrium with a crazy-dynamic environment. Jumping into a new environment after being conditioned for a very different one likely leads to death much much more often than an accidental advantage. You might not be able to even breathe were you transported a few hundred million years either forward or backward.
Depending on how far back you go, today's planetary environment is a very different place - in terms of chemical food, predatory tactics, biochemical efficiency, atmosphere, etc. Having to compete against organisms that are efficiently adapted in our current environment will almost certainly be immediately lethal for these revived organisms.
> Ideally we'd quickly gain immunity to the parasite
In evolution, a population gaining immunity means that all individuals without the immunity die out before spreading their genes. Yeah, still not the ideal scenario...
> 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.
This falls under the class of things that if they could happen, they already would have. The global temperature is not a uniform scalar modifier on what the temperature "would" have been without the changes. There are already hot spots and cold spots every year, continuously. There are already places in the ice that thawed out last year, and ten years ago, and during the Medieval warm period, and whenever it was warm before that. And we have not witnessed mass dieoffs due to disease from those events either.
It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it.
The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life.
It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens.
Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.
IANAD, but I imagine modern bacteria that have evolved multi-antibiotic resistances are much more dangerous than ancient bacteria that are probably still vulnerable to most of our antibiotics.
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.
That's if it materializes. What's already material is 410 ppm carbon in the atmosphere and rapidly thawing polar sea ice that regulates ocean temperatures. If you are scared about some ice germs then you might as well be reading USA Today for sensationalism. The truly scary stuff is not fun to read about like this.
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...
Readit News
On the whole, this is not an alarmist article at all. It merely explains some potential risks based on the findings of serious scientists.
Do you have anything to add to the discussion other than pure speculation, fearmongering and conspiracy theories regarding the motivations of the authors and scientists?
Russian roulette is a game for fools and those with no hope, not an intelligent species with only one habitable planet.
To help you out, here are the researched facts that the article links to:
1) 1918 Spanish flu virus found in corpses buried in Alaska's tundra https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17944266
2) Study on the effects of permafrost melt in East Siberia and the 18th and 19th century deadly infections it might release http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/gha.v4i0.8482
3) Results from a study on the viruses present in the corpses of Stone Age people http://www.istc.int/en/project/84980DF9853EABD94325690B000F3...
4) Frozen bodies found to have contained fragments of DNA of Smallpox virus http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1208124
5) Proof that frozen bacteria from 32,000 years ago can actually be revived http://ijs.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/ijsem/10...
6) Did i say 32,000 years? I meant 8million years http://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13455
7) Not just bacteria, 30,000 year old viruses can be revived as well http://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/4274
8) Ancient bacteria are resistant to 70% of known antibiotics https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13803
9) Many of the bacteria emerging from melting permafrost may already have antibiotic resistance because natural resistance to antibiotics is so prevalent https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10388.epdf?referrer_ac...
But yes, lets talk about facts.
Dead Comment
In this case I suppose I should take a more direct active role in attempting to mitigate FUD or verifiable inaccuracies - but those comments take a lot of effort and sourcing. Probably something everyone here should attempt to do more often though :)
But overall the conjecture and discourse in topics I'm relatively read up on but not a deep subject expert I find quite enjoyable, even if I know some of the details are likely to be wildly inaccurate. It's usually more than enough information to get pointed in the right direction so I can start doing my own highly specific research. I've found out about all sorts of awesome technologies/tools/projects I never would have if I hadn't read the comments on interesting subjects.
Overall I find that to simply be humans. Bar conversation was likely riddled with even less adherence to facts from otherwise scientific and principled people. It just happens, and is part of being human - you do it too and don't even know it. Most likely at least.
Here's a more recent article that cites some papers: https://www.verywell.com/are-operating-rooms-cold-to-prevent...
Thus half the reason for saunas (besides the Heat Shock Protein effects): they turn all the gels caught in your pores, your sinuses, your tonsils, your lungs, etc. to liquid, where your body can then much more easily flush them out.
Though, freezing cold air isn't that bad, either: a lot of those liquids will become fully solid. Frozen snot grows no bacteria.
I guess it's just the "danger zone" principle of food safety, applied to human tissue?
Deleted Comment
It's a fairly good TV show on this topic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortitude_(TV_series)
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.
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.
Depending on how far back you go, today's planetary environment is a very different place - in terms of chemical food, predatory tactics, biochemical efficiency, atmosphere, etc. Having to compete against organisms that are efficiently adapted in our current environment will almost certainly be immediately lethal for these revived organisms.
In evolution, a population gaining immunity means that all individuals without the immunity die out before spreading their genes. Yeah, still not the ideal scenario...
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.
Famous last words
It's like the concerns about high-energy collisions doing something terrible like forming micro-blackholes and eating the Earth. If that was a danger, it would be something Nature would already be doing and we'd be able to see it.
The ability to "infect" something is not a natural property that all bacteria have. It is something that has to evolve. A bacteria popping out of cold storage from half a million years ago precisely adapted to infect a modern animal would be every bit as weird as seeing a bacteria pop out of that same cold storage that was precisely evolved to live on Mars, or live on vast quantities of plastic, or otherwise adapted to conditions it couldn't possible have witnessed during its previous life.
It isn't absolutely, mathematically impossible. But it's not much worth worrying about. It's a science fiction storyline, not something that happens.
Now, if there were humans in such cold storage, I would be somewhat more careful. But so far in those cases where that has occurred we still haven't been wiped out. I haven't even heard of anyone pinning so much as a cold virus on pulling a cadaver out of a glacier. Links welcome if anybody does have such a story.
If it materializes, I'm sure you'll set you priorities straight
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...
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/03/48840094...