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Comment by runarb | Hacker News Reader

Can thus bacterias be dangerous somehow? For example be more potent than the plague that sometimes surfaces today.

The people in the pictures do not appear to wear much protection.

Not very likely. Most pathogens are only able to survive outside host for only a limited amount of time. I can't give you exact numbers for Yersinia pestis, but it's certainly not centuries.

One recent example of what you suggest is the recent Anthrax outbreak in Siberia. Though in this situation we are talking 1) about a pathogen that is particularly famous for ability to form spores and survive a long time and 2) frozen state

It can no doubt be treated with an antibiotic, and they've probably determined some that work that are also comparable with humans.

The real trick is to avoid creating and breathing in an aerosol, which has I'm sure killed more than one researcher before he and his doctor realized what was happening, I heard of one such case in the '70s when I was doing work on E. Coli during a summer program involving salmonella. If you get too much lung tissue---lots of surface area---infected too quickly, well, see pneumonic plague, it's anthrax equivalent, which an Air Force flight surgeon's manual said the first clear diagnostic sign from a patient is his sudden death, etc.

And echoing loxs, it's very unlikely they're working with viable bacteria, if they're just sequencing DNA or the like they're far, far from something viable, and I don't believe it creates spores.

I wonder whether these 17th-century strains of bacteria, if they survived and infected someone today, would have less resistance to modern antibiotics than modern strains do. That would make them much easier to manage.

They would - until they started exchanging DNA with modern bacteria.

"Modern", sort of, since these antibiotics have generally started from compounds molds etc. use for attacks on bacteria in the same ecological niche, many if not most?? of these counters have by and large been there all along in the modern age of antibiotics, it's just that they now spread a lot more since they give bacteria attacking humans a competitive advantage (few if any of these otherwise help the bacteria, especially unless the plasmid or whatever has a regulatory system to turn it off when not needed).

And many can be countered with standard mutations, i.e. something that messes with the surface protein that transports them inside. When I was doing a bit of E. Coli microbiology in the summer of 1977 the conventional wisdom was for a generic antibiotic, like the colicin we were working with, 1 in a million bacterial would spontaneously develop a mutation (which I further did the grunt work to prove the ones we had were of the surface protein type, by and large). Streptomycin, though, would take 1 in a billion.

Oh, they survived, if you play around with cute rodents in the right parts of the US West you can get yourself a nice case of the plague, look here for an excellent map and more details on cases and deaths per year etc.: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/

Of course, passing through humans for a half century, and then through these rodents, it won't be quite the same, but...

The average length of intact Y. pestis DNA that researchers are capable of extracting from medieval teeth is something in the order of 55 basepairs.

To put that into perspective - Y. pestis' main chromosome is a little over 4 million basepairs. So it is only broken pieces of code that they can recover, not the whole, intact bacterium. No risk here.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7370/full/nature1...

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