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In 2016, a 12-year-old boy died and more than 70 people were hospitalised in north-eastern Siberia after an outbreak of a bacteria that scientists had long believed was dormant.
The culprit: global warming.
Scientists say the anthrax bacteria was released by the permafrost melting. Temperatures rose, and animals became ill. Then, people ate the meat of a sick reindeer, becoming infected themselves. 
As global warming thaws soils, releasing pathogens, the occurrence of such outbreaks could become more common.
“The danger is real,” says virologist Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg. Bacteria could have survived for centuries on bodies buried in the soil that the ice is now releasing due to rising temperatures, he says.
Climate change is having a disproportionate effect on areas with permafrost, including Alaska, Canada and Siberia.


Copernicus, the European Earth observation programme, said May 2019 was the warmest on average worldwide since records began in 1979.
Siberia was recorded as being up to 10 times hotter than the average recorded between 1981 and 2010, while Alaska and Antarctica were also significantly warmer than average.
People have been buried for centuries in the Arctic permafrost – including those who died of diseases and in epidemics.
Russia says melting permafrost caused massive Arctic oil spill
Ten years ago, scientists managed to resurrect genetic information about the Spanish flu, the epidemic that killed millions, thanks to particles in the body of a woman buried in Alaska 75 years ago. 
Permafrost and the woman’s fat reserves preserved the virus in her lungs. She was buried in a mass grave, beneath 2 metres of ice and dirt, in a remote Inuit village near the town of Brevig Mission.
Scientists are now assessing how dangerous such diseases could be.
“Viruses do not pose a greater danger,” says Schmidt-Chanasit.
Usually people only get sick if they are exposed to a relatively high viral load. Diseases also become less infectious over time; the longer a body with a virus remains below the ice, the less dangerous the pathogens are likely to be.


Schmidt-Chanasit says that while researchers have found viable viruses when drilling in ice or permafrost, “they were brought to life under laboratory conditions.”
Bacteria, however, are more resistant, which makes them more dangerous. “Anthrax spores are environmentally stable,” says Schmidt-Chanasit. They can survive for a long time in frozen soil and infect animals, then people.
The bacteria that causes anthrax – also known as splenic fever – has already infected entire herds of reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula. After deaths were recorded repeatedly in recent years, many animals are being vaccinated as a precaution.
Meet the 18,000-year-old prehistoric puppy found frozen in Russia’s permafrost
The danger that bacteria will mutate, however, presents a further worry. 
Two years ago, Russian biologists discovered microorganisms in layers of permafrost in Yakutia, in north-eastern Siberia, that they estimated to be more than 3 million years old.
If such long-frozen pathogens exchange their genetic material with present-day bacteria, harmless microbes could become dangerous, the scientists said, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS.
And thawing permafrost is not the only threat to people’s health amid global warming.
Ticks and mosquitoes are also playing a growing role as vectors of infectious diseases previously restricted to warmer regions, as they are able to survive the increasingly mild winters.
Last year, people in the south of France were infected with the Zika virus transmitted by tiger mosquitoes, which have become native to the area, in the first detected occurrence in Europe.
The newly imported and sometimes-fatal West Nile virus is also causing outbreaks in Europe. Germany reported its first case in September 2019. The virus, which originates in Africa, was previously known as an epizootic disease mainly affecting birds.
Worryingly, the virus can now be transmitted by domestic mosquitoes.
Here too, climate change counts, experts say.
The warmer the temperature, the faster the pathogen in the mosquito reproduces, increasing the risk of transmission.
So if you needed more reason to begin fighting climate change, just think about all the deadly diseases lurking just below the surface.


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‘Danger is real’: why viruses long thought extinct are re-emerging

If long-frozen pathogens exchange their genetic material with present-day bacteria, harmless microbes could become dangerous, scientists said. Photo: Shuttertock

Russia says melting permafrost caused massive Arctic oil spill

An aerial view of the large diesel spill in the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk, taken on June 4. Photo: Planet Labs Inc / AFP

This handout photograph released by the Marine Rescue Service of Russia on June 5, 2020, shows a rescuer as he pumps out pollutions of a large diesel spill in the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk. - Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 3, ordered a state of emergency and criticised a subsidiary of metals giant Norilsk Nickel after a massive diesel spill into a Siberian river. The spill of over 20,000 tonnes of diesel fuel took place on May 29, 2020. A fuel reservoir collapsed at a power plant near the city of Norilsk, located above the Arctic Circle, and leaked into a nearby river. (Photo by Yuri KADOBNOV / Marine Rescue Service / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / MARINE RESCUE SERVICE OF RUSSIA " - NO MARKETING - NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS

epa08466850 A handout picture made available by the press service of the Public Joint Stock Company 'Transneft' shows rescues who pump out oil-water mixture from the water surface at the site of oil products spill into the Ambarnaya river outside of Norilsk, Russia, 05 June 2020. About 20,000 tonnes of oil products leaked 29 May 2020 and soiled the waters of Ambarnaya and Daldykan rivers after an accident at a heat and power station (a Norilsk Nickel subsidiary) in industrial city of Norilsk located above the Arctic Circle. EPA-EFE/Transneft PJSC press service/ Handout HANDOUT HANDOUT EDITORIAL USE ONLY/NO SALES

Workers pump out oil pollution from the Ambarnaya River outside Norilsk on June 5, 2020. Photo: AFP

Meet the 18,000-year-old prehistoric puppy found frozen in Russia’s permafrost

An 18,000-year-old puppy found in permafrost in Russia, on display at the Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum. Photo: AP

This is a handout photo taken on Monday, Sept. 24, 2018, showing a 18,000 years old Puppy found in permafrost in the Russia's Far East, on display at the Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum, Russia. Russian scientists have presented a unique prehistoric canine, believed to be 18,000 years old and found in permafrost in the Russia's Far East, to the public on Monday, Dec. 2, 2019. (Sergei Fyodorov, Yakutsk Mammoth Museum via AP)

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As global warming thaws soils, releasing pathogens, the occurrence of outbreaks could become more common
Climate change is having a disproportionate effect on areas with permafrost, including Alaska, Canada and Siberia



As temperatures rise in Siberia, people are suffering from unexpected diseases as the permafrost releases frozen microbes.


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