Monday, August 01, 2016
Melting
Permafrost Releases Deadly, Long-Dormant Anthrax in Siberia
"This week's anthrax outbreak signals that global warming
is transforming Siberia's lonely wilderness into a feverish
nightmarescape"
www.commondreams.org/news/2016/08/01/melting-permafrost-releases-deadly-long-dormant-anthrax-siberia
A Russian heatwave has activated long-dormant
anthrax bacteria in Siberia, sickening at least 13 people and killing one boy
and more than 2,300 reindeer.
According to the Siberian
Times on Monday:
A total
of 72 people are now in hospital, a rise of 32 since Friday, under close
observation amid fears of a major outbreak. 41 of those hospitalized are
children as Russia copes with a full scale health emergency above the polar
circle which has also killed thousands of reindeer.
A state of emergency has been imposed
throughout the region in western Siberia, and reindeer herding communities have
been quarantined.
While NBC News last
week pinned the blame for
the outbreak on "[t]he carcass of a reindeer thought to have died from
anthrax decades ago," new reports suggest an old burial ground could be
the source. Nadezhda Noskova, press secretary of the
Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region government, told the Siberian Times:
We are
working out all the versions of what has happened. The first version is that
due to the very hot weather permafrost thawed and bared the carcass of an
animal which died from anthrax long ago.
The other
version is that it could have been a human body. The point is that Nenets and
Khanty peoples do not bury their dead in the ground.
They put
them into the wooden coffins—they resemble boxes—and place them on a stand or
hillock.
The old
cemetery could be also the source of the disease.
But regardless of the precise culprit,
there's little doubt that climate change is exacerbating the health crisis.
The Washington Post noted last
week, "Temperatures have soared in western Russia's Yamal tundra
this summer," with several regions seeing record
heat. Indeed, temperatures in the Yamal tundra above the Arctic Circle have hit
highs of 95°F this summer, compared to an average of 77°F.
The Post quoted two Russian
researchers, who warned in 2011: "As a consequence of permafrost melting,
the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th centuries may come
back...especially near the cemeteries where the victims of these infections were
buried."
"The extreme heat has triggered a
seemingly endless rash of freak weather, natural disasters, and signs of
ecological malaise, including enormous
wildfires, record flooding, and natural moon
bounces [methane bubbles] that might be explosive," staff
writer Maddie Stone reported at Gizmodo. "But above all else,
this week's anthrax outbreak—the first to hit the region since 1941—signals
that global warming is transforming Siberia's lonely wilderness into a feverish
nightmarescape."
Or, as Charles Pierce wrote at Esquire on
Monday, "an anthrax strain that has spent 75 years resting, sleeping a
lot, going a few times a week to the Bacteria Gym, and generally muscling up,
gets another chance at sickening reindeer and people because the Great Climate
Change Hoax has thawed the permafrost, so it gets its shot at the reindeer and
people that didn't die in the record wildfires. I would point out that one of
our two major political parties doesn't believe that any of this is happening,
and that the party's candidate for president thinks it all might be a hoax
thought up by the Chinese."
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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