Bacteria and Viruses Released by Melting of Permafrost Unlikely to Trigger a Widespread Pandemic but Will Infect Northern Peoples, Sakha Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 22 – It has long been known that the melting of the permafrost is releasing into the atmosphere varieties of bacteria and viruses hitherto unknown in the modern world that would trigger a widespread pandemic because people today have no defenses against such organisms.

            Some Russian writers have even suggested that this process could lead to epidemics in Russia, given that permafrost underlies 65 percent of the territory of that country and ultimately lead to the extinction of human life on earth (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-ice-will-melt-and-we-will-all-die.html).

            But a specialist on permafrost from Sakha, unnamed because of the sensitivity of this issue, says that such outcomes are unlikely because if these bacteria and viruses had that capacity, they would already almost certainly have produced such outcomes in the past (kedr.media/stories/my-tolko-chut-chut-poskrebli-po-poverhnosti/).

            But if such apocalypses are unlikely, the Sakha permafrost specialist says, they are far more likely to affect local populations in the Russian north, a development that will require both intensify investigation and the expansion of medical facilities in that region or indeed many there will become sick and even die from the release of such bacteria and viruses.

            There is little evidence that Moscow is prepared to spend the money necessary; and so yet another threat to the survival of the numerically small peoples of the North and Far East is emerging, one from the very soil on which they and their ancestors have lived for many centuries.