Could the next pandemic be triggered by melting permafrost?

The melting permafrost of Siberia exposed live anthrax spores in the remains of long-dead animals. What other possible triggers are there for another pandemic?

The pandemic revealed a great deal about our weaknesses (and strengths) in the face of global disaster. As hospitals filled with the infected, frontline healthcare workers dressed in bin bags to treat patients, and we stood in the streets to clap and bang pots together in appreciation. Everyone who could stayed at home, missing birthdays and funerals. Rule-breakers were held up like compromised ants before the rest of the colony. 

The Covid outbreak showed us the best in ourselves – but it also tested our sense of justice. We agreed to follow the rules, but with the proviso that, in doing so, we would eventually be allowed to take our masks off and moan about it over a pint. This was 21st-century ‘blitz spirit’: we were going to get through this together because ultimately normality was what we deserved. 

This is the fantasy world in which we currently find ourselves. Covid has not gone anywhere – hundreds of people in the UK die each week with Covid listed as causal on their death certificates. And the machines of commerce are moving again: the planes have returned to the sky and ships to the sea, and people have returned to the supermarkets to buy toilet rolls, meat and the exotic fruit and vegetables that are available all year round. The press has moved on to cover wars in Ukraine and Sudan, and the government has moved on from clapping doctors and nurses to locking them into an endless cycle of strike actions and pay disputes.

Despite a new pandemic disease taking, by the government’s own admission in its 2020 National Risk Register, joint-first place in potential ‘impact’ (read: ‘disaster’) alongside a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack, the subject is now taboo. Nobody, outside the tiny cohort of disease and global health experts, wants to talk about pandemics anymore. In this sense too, we are finally ‘back to normal’.

David Quammen, chronicler of humanity’s fraught relationship with nature and infectious diseases, says: “Even Donald Trump was aware that scientists were warning that a pandemic could come, and that it would cost tens of billions of dollars to improve our preparations. But nobody could tell Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or anyone else that the pandemic would arrive on their watch, between now and the next election, so it would be their responsibility. No one could tell them that for sure, and tens of billions of dollars sounded prohibitive. So we [now] have tens of trillions of dollars in costs, and millions of lives lost.”

Quammen’s investigations are exhaustive: his arguably best-known book Spillover (2012), condenses humanity’s hairiest brushes with zoonotic diseases (diseases that ‘spill over’ from animals into humans – including Ebola, Zika and bird flu) into 500 pages of facts, figures and personal testimonies from experts in every field of disease research. His most recent work, Breathless (2022), is dedicated to Covid: what went wrong, what went right, who knew what and when, plus some reflections on whatever is coming next.

Under a bad star

“You’ve got six dice in a shaker,” Quammen says. “You keep shaking them and rolling them, and you don’t have a virus that’s capable of infecting humans and spreading quickly until you’ve got six snake eyes. But if you shake the dice and roll them millions of times, it becomes statistically likely that you will come up with [six] snake eyes. That would be the first accident.”

In his latest book, Quammen describes a theory of pandemic outbreak called the ‘double accident’, which he credits to molecular biologist Roger Frutos. There is no single cause of a pandemic; rather, at least two stars need to align to take a disease from passing unnoticed to disaster. In the case of Covid, the first accident was a coronavirus evolving through mutation and recombination in such a way as to be able to make the jump to humans and be easily transmissible from one to another.

The second accident was that China was in the middle of celebrating its Spring Festival just as the virus was starting to spread in Wuhan. Wuhan is the most populous city in central China and a transport hub for hundreds of thousands of Chinese family members travelling across the country to visit loved ones. Covid could have stayed a localised outbreak. Just as it was getting a toehold in the human immune system, Wuhan was flooded with travellers who would carry it all over the country, and then further afield by plane, road and sea.

We might not know the first accident in the next global pandemic yet. It might be taking its first fumbling steps through a North American cattle ranch or Chinese pig farm. Somewhere in the Amazon, a logger might be complaining to his colleagues that the cab of his truck has, again, been coated overnight with bat droppings – droppings which then dry out in the sun, and crumble into a breathable dust next to the cab’s air intake.

On the other hand, our next pandemic could be something with which we’re already familiar, just waiting for its own second accident – its own Spring Festival. Something like bird flu.

“We are not prepared for avian influenza,” says Quammen, by way of example. “We’re not prepared to contain it, we’re not monitoring poultry workers, we’re not taking blood samples from poultry workers once a week and screening them for evidence of bird flu. It could happen. I hope it doesn’t.”

Discovering the true origin of a disease outbreak – working backwards through its double accident – is more difficult than prevention. In 1967, a new haemorrhagic fever was discovered. A cousin to Ebola, it infected 31 people working with African green monkeys imported from Uganda in three cities: Frankfurt and Marburg (after which the disease was named) in Germany, and Belgrade in what was then Yugoslavia. Seven of those infected were killed.

But the disease, researchers realised quickly, did not evolve in monkeys. The monkeys were carriers of the disease but not the origin. Marburg would kill hundreds in multiple outbreaks, in a fashion not dissimilar to Ebola – particularly in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Forty-one years after its first appearance, the Egyptian fruit bat would be named the original host of the virus.

This system of biosecurity places the responsibility of guarding against the next pandemic on the shoulders of frontline workers, such as subsistence farmers and logging company employees. But blaming them is like blaming South American coca farmers for the damage done by the cocaine trade. To avoid – even to temper – the effects of the next pandemic, the onus must be on those who profit or benefit from each roll of the dice.

“The people running those stalls at the Wuhan market are not wealthy people,” says Quammen. “[But] the people running the wildlife farms in southern China, raising massive numbers of raccoon dogs and porcupines and civets, they might be really wealthy. And the people running the massive poultry operations [globally] are certainly wealthy – the people who own those places where you have 300,000 chickens being raised: the workers are labouring for a wage, but the owners are presumably making big profits.

“We have to restructure our global economy – and that’s easy to say and extremely difficult to do – so that the people who are making the real money are paying the real costs, including the costs of preparing for disaster or coping with disaster.

“The third link in that chain is the consumer. If you or I go to the supermarket and we buy a package of supermarket chicken wrapped in cellophane, we should be paying the costs of preparation against avian flu too. We should be paying another couple of pounds for that.  

“Those costs need to be paid in advance by everybody, rather than in times of emergency and disaster by a relatively small number of people who happen to be at the interface between the animals, the virus and themselves.”

Outbreaks of disease among farmed animals are nothing new. Neither is the idea that the further we push into nature, the harder nature will push back. We will increasingly be forced to confront disease threats from an almost wholly new source: diseases buried in Arctic permafrost being thawed by global warming and resurrected into the present-day food chain.