Can Climate Change Cause a Pandemic?

A few months ago I was watching television, and the setting was in Alaska.  The activities of the show involved thawing permafrost and digging down to bedrock in pursuit of gold.  On the episode that gave me pause for concern a mammoth tusk was uncovered. 

The problem I am concerned with is whether bacteria are cryogenically preserved in the permafrost where organic material was flash frozen.  In addition, a virus remaining dormant in frozen material is another possibility.  These could easily have been bacteria and viruses associated with long eradicated diseases, but lying in suspended animation in the permafrost.  When thawed, bacteria and viruses that predate human life could easily become viable, and the human race could have no natural immunization to prevent disease from spreading.  This would be just as dangerous as having bacteria and viruses come from outer space, alien to us as a species.

No, I know of no evidence of an immediate danger, but it is a plausible scenario.  And global warming can be the trigger to release whatever lies dormant in the permafrost, nature’s freezer.  So, we must be vigilant to the possibility.

I did run this problem by two biology professors at the college since this is outside my fields of physics and mathematics, and they agreed it is possible to have frozen organic material with viable bacteria and viruses.

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Much has been studied about the bubonic plague outbreaks that devastated Europe in past centuries.  The finger always points to rats as carriers of infected fleas.  And the source has been attributed to the rats arrival on ships involved with trade.  This seems to have little to do with climate change on the surface, but digging deeper reveals the connection.

The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is used by an online article from CBS to correlate rat populations in Asia with climate, and consequently bubonic plague outbreaks that found their way to Europe.  Also, the occurrences of the bubonic plague in Europe occurred during the Little Ice Age, when famine and extreme temperatures rendered the population vulnerable to disease. 

A different mechanism could be famine reduced crops, and the food chain could be disrupted, with predators coming back too slowly to control carriers of a disease.  My students often find recovery of owls and snakes occurred too slowly to control the rats, and while I cannot find a source to confirm this happened, I is a plausible scenario.  Plausibility is our purpose here.

So, it is quite possible climate has already caused pandemics.  Indeed, it is likely.