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When Yakutsk authorities invited participants to a youth government initiative to think of ideas for creating empty ground in the center last year, this seemed like a smart way to get rid of A horror.
But the project was blocked after residents and officials expressed concern that the site might contain anthrax spores preserved in permanently frozen ground.
Although specialists finally said that it was safe to build a field skate park, which formerly contained a laboratory producing a coal serum, the incident raised further questions about old diseases known to hide in permafrost – and on the fact that they could be unlocked by global warming.
"The anthrax spores can stay alive in the permafrost for 2,500 years, which is frightening given the thaw of 19th century animal graves," said Boris Kershengolts, a Yakutsk biologist who studies climates. North. "When they come out of the permafrost and put in our temperatures, they live again."
Yakutsk is the coldest city on the planet, with temperatures that can drop below -60 ° C in winter. But there is a beginning of warming that could lead to the destruction of infrastructure and the resurgence of latent diseases, as more and more people join new military bases and oil and gas facilities.
At an Arctic forum in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin described as "alarming trend" the fact that Russia is warming two and a half times faster than the rest of the world.
Permafrost, made up of almost the entire vast region of Yakutia, is covered by two-thirds of Russia's surface and can be hundreds of meters deep.
Now these icy links begin to break.
In many places, the active layer, the few upper feet thawed and frozen each year, thaw earlier and deeper.
Permafrost in central Yakutia decreases by 1 cm to 5 cm per year, and more in urban areas.
The anthrax is called here "Siberian plague" for ravaging livestock and humans from previous centuries. Caused by a bacterium that can naturally be found in the soil, the bacillus usually infects animals with the plants or water they consume and has caused periodic outbreaks during the course of history .
Humans can become ill by breathing, drinking, eating, or coming into contact with the spores of the bacteria through an open cut, often developing blisters with a black center.
If complications such as fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhea are not treated in time with antibiotics, they can lead to death.
The warming has already been linked to the first anthrax outbreak in the Yamal Arctic region in 70 years.
Among temperatures reaching 35 ° C in 2016, about 2,000 reindeer died and 96 people were hospitalized. A boy (12 years old) died after ingesting infected raw venison.
The experts concluded that "the appearance of anthrax was stimulated by the activation of" old "infection sites following abnormally high air temperature and by the thawing sites to a depth exceeding normal levels ".
Other diseases could also be expected. The researchers discovered fragments of smallpox DNA on bodies of Russian permafrost and RNA from the 1918 Spanish flu in Alaska.
Independent Irish
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