What If?

Another Disease is Waiting for Us.

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, I wrote a paper that seemed like science fiction. Today I’ve updated this paper with new populations statistics, but otherwise the threat is more real than it was twenty-five years ago.

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What was once academic speculation about ancient pathogens emerging from melting permafrost became front-page news in 2016, when an unusually warm Siberian summer unleashed a 70-year-old anthrax outbreak that hospitalized dozens, including children, and forced mass evacuations. It also led to the death and culling of more than two hundred thousand reindeer.

The permafrost anthrax scenario represents just one threat in an expanding universe of viral dangers facing humanity. As climate change accelerates, we're not only releasing ancient pathogens from thawing Arctic soil, but also driving new viral spillovers from wildlife populations, expanding disease vectors into new territories, and creating unprecedented opportunities for pathogen emergence and evolution.