NEWS: Watch Your Step! Attack of Frozen Poo!

CULTURE: Watch Your Step! Attack of Frozen Poo!

If the heat won't kill you, the cold might. According to New Scientist, as ice thaws from global warming killer viruses trapped in the ice might make a return.

It is presumed likely that the frozen ice stores many viruses in the droppings left there by migratory animals. This means that as the ice melts, migrating birds can be infected by a whole host of preserved viruses.

Should birds become infected with these long dormant diseases it is plausible that the variety of viruses stored in the ice could be transferred to humans. If this were to happen humans would likely have no immunity to them, and a possible widespread epidemic could ensue. The huge variety of strains that may be reintroduced would also make it very difficult for scientists to combat many strains effectively.

We better hurry up with that Moon Station.

That is the biggest bunch of alarmist horseshit I have heard in years.

It's ebola, sars, West Nile and Bird Flu all over again! We all 'gon die!

wasn't this a Michael Crichton or Robin Cook novel at one point? Or a SciFi Channel movie-of-the-week?

Why?

Are you a scientist? I'm not either, and I don't know how plausible this is, but I'm just wondering if you've got the background to be so confidently dismissive.

it's definitely possible. whether or not a world-wide epidemic is probable or not is another story. the threat of dormant viruses and bacteria being set loose is present with the clearing of land in jungles and old forests as well, but we've yet to see another Black Plague emerge. it's difficult to predict that sort of thing.

SARS didn't kill me, the bird flu didn't kill me, monkey pox didn't kill me, mad cow hasn't killed me. I'll start worrying when someone provides me any shred of evidence that there are actual, visible risks here. A dozen deaths among the elderly and extremely young aren't enough to scare me.

As crazy as this sounds I had a professor who was a Doctor of Biology who brought up this same point. The idea being that some bacteria and virus's can go into a state of suspended animation that can last for thousands of years. Many of them would be considered "new" as far as the human immune system is concerned and therefore we would have little to no antibody history for them (wouldn't be in genes), unlike the majority of pathogens today. Some information about immunity is stored in the DNA of humans, a good example are the handful of people who have AIDS but suffer no ill effects, many of them are also 'immune' to the bubonic plague (mispelled) and had relatives who lived in Europe during the time of the Black Death who survived.

If you want I can post a link

You haven't been listening very well then, cause this is not a new idea.
Actually, even before I heard about scientists considering this, I started a dialog about this very idea back when I was a freshman in high school with my physical science class. The teacher said it was completely plausible as far as he was concerned.

Or is global warming the alarmist horsshit?

I don't think he's saying it's not possible, just that it's not a real danger. Every year or so, scientists come up with some new doomsday scenario, and just as often, about a dozen people die, and it just disappears eventually.

Don't mean to be a downer, but mad cow can lie dormant in humans' system for over a decade, actually, many doctors are predicting there will likely be some number of people dying in the future cause of mad cow infected meat they consumed years prior.

Alright. I can accept that.

Everybody knows global warming was invented by Al Gore.

Did you, um, actually CONTRACT sars, bird flu, monkey pox, and mad cow?

If you did... bravo, man. Bravo.

Isn't the human death toll for bird flu currently hovering around zero? I could be wrong, but I thought it had killed, at present, precisely no one.

I'm with FP.

Besides, even if these are plausible risks, people should still be far more terrified of their SUVs.

Nope. And neither did 99.99999% of the human population. It's not a threat.

I think there may have been one or two in China and I'm pretty sure SARS got one. Hardly an epic death toll.

Actually... there was one of the university residences that apparently had an outbreak of that. I laughed.

No one died.

Common fucking sense.

You know how alarmed the media was making the general population for ebola, SARS, West Nile, Bird Flu?

And...

You know how many people got ebola, SARS, West Nile, Bird Flu?

There are a lot of options between "fear and panic" and "pile of horseshit". If people take note of these things then it becomes nice and easy for governments to fund things like bird monitoring and vaccine research/capacity.

Bird flue has killed dozens of people as it is. The worry is that a mutated form which is able to move from person to person will appear, hardly a bizarre characteristic for a flu virus. Historically a killer flu come along every few generations, there's nothing hypothetical about them.

Not so long ago similar list of "hoaxes" could have included AIDS. Politicians were slow to act, it was a joke to some, a gay plague to others.

Attacking the alarmist media is one thing, lumping NewScientist articles in with that is another.

LOL!

The ice on the moon I'm sure is ready for human consumption.

We're killing this planet and each other but we're gonna be able to live on the moon?

Source

That's a 60% mortality rate. If you're not scared, you should be.