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Deepfreeze death

As the climate goes from bad to worse, some scientists are issuing a worrying warning about a side-effect of global warming that could pose an almost existential threat to mankind.

They're not refering to floods or other extreme weather events, they're talking about something far more sinister and invisible to the naked eye.

Apparently there are some very interesting biological organisms locked up in prehistoric ice flows and if these flows were to melt, in response to increases in global temperatures, we could all be in a lot of trouble.

The ability for low temperatures to preserve organisms such as bacteria and viruses for extremely long periods of time could see many now-extinct pathogens re-released into our ecosphere as glaciers retreat and polar ice begins to melt.

A story currently on the wires documents that ice samples taken in Romania from inside a large cave have contained a worrying find.

The bacteria discovered in those samples are believed to be around 5,000 years old and indications are that many modern antibiotics would have little chance of fighting them -- should they create an infection in a human.

More information on the microbes, labeled Psychrobacter SC65A.3, can be found in this paper, if you're feeling up to it.

The bottom line is that this could be just one of many pathogens which are currently in suspended animation and just waiting to be thawed by climate change. They seem to be so dramatically different to the types of bacteria and viruses that our bodies have adapted to fight today that we may well be defensless against these archived threats.

Fortunately for mankind as a species, genetic diversity means that even if one of these bugs was found to be immune to our best antibiotics and was capable of creating lethal infections, there would almost certainly be a few who would survive. Perhaps they would have traces of immunity that my have been present in primates at the time when such pathogens were commonplace in the environment.

For the rest of us however, this is potentially the stuff that pandemics are made of and Covid 19 could seem like a walk in the park of the absolute worst predictions came to pass.

What can we do to prevent this?

Not much really.

This is definitely a Doris Day situation (que sera sera).

Even if we tried to sample as many potential repositories for these nasty bacteria as we could, in the hope of developing countermeasures before they were needed, we'd never find all of them.

However we do need to acknowledge that this type of outbreak is a very real possibility, especially when you realise that just a decade ago this happened as a result of melting permafrost.

Carpe Diem folks!

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