In other news,
"with the Duke of Westminster’s early summer wedding already setting society aflutter (who is and isn’t on the guest list), what else is in store for the 2024 season? Only the weddings of Prince Mateen, Lady Tamara Conyngham and Louisa Wentworth-Stanley to name a few…"
Though the Tatler roundup is fascinating, we must turn away and face the Arctic zombie viruses, squarely and forthrightly (blame Russia).
From The Guardian, January 21:
Threat of outbreak from microbes trapped in permafrost for millennia raised by increased Siberian shipping activity
Humanity is facing a bizarre new pandemic threat, scientists have warned. Ancient viruses frozen in the Arctic permafrost could one day be released by Earth’s warming climate and unleash a major disease outbreak, they say.
Strains of these Methuselah microbes – or zombie viruses as they are also known – have already been isolated by researchers who have raised fears that a new global medical emergency could be triggered – not by an illness new to science but by a disease from the distant past.
As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that would pinpoint early cases of a disease caused by ancient micro-organisms. Additionally, it would provide quarantine and expert medical treatment for infected people in a bid to contain an outbreak, and prevent infected people from leaving the region.
“At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,” said geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University. “By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.”
This point was backed by virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this could happen.”
In 2014, Claverie led a team of scientists who isolated live viruses in Siberia and showed they could still infect single-cell organisms – even though they had been buried in permafrost for thousands of years. Further research, published last year, revealed the existence of several different viral strains from seven different sites in Siberia and showed these could infect cultured cells. One virus sample was 48,500 years old....
....MUCH MORE
We do not care for some of the denizens of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.
Not. At. All.
Hey, Remember Those Wacky Dutch Scientists Who Weaponized Bird Flu To Kill Half The World's Population?
I had forgotten about Ron Fouchier until a friend sent an article from the journal Science. But sure enough we had November 2011's "UPDATED--"Dutch Scientists Have Genetically Altered the H5N1 Bird Flu Virus to Make it More Contagious" (could kill half humanity)" and then when they wanted to publish the recipe and the U.S. said no: "Psychotic Dutch Scientists: "Killer flu doctors: US censorship is a danger to science".
