The Laptev Virus

“That’s smart,” said Shane, shamelessly addressing Oscar. “I’d stay the… I mean, well, I wouldn’t recommend going anywhere near there. I also discovered that there were a ton of ‘secret dumps.’ Reports that I read said there were 17,000 containers and more than a dozen ships with radioactive waste, and something like 14 nuclear reactors. The Russians have been dumping stuff up there for decades, pretty much unchecked.”

“Damn!” said Oscar, his brow surging skyward in surprise.

“Yeah,” said Shane, obviously enjoying himself once again. “It’s a ticking time bomb up there. I think they began dumping in the 1950s. And after all that time you know there’s gonna be stuff leaking, if there hasn’t already been stuff released. Things don’t stay put, you know. Not under those conditions, with the salt and the pressure of the weight of all that water. The ocean erodes things and all metal eventually succumbs.”

“I guess we’re lucky that Laptev didn’t make its debut earlier, given the conditions in that part of the world,” said Miquela.

Everyone in the group nodded grimly.

“The thing is,” said Drew, “the fact that this Laptev virus was there in the first place, and that it was able to make humans sick, is significant. It may be that the acidic ocean permeated the capsid and activated the virus, but if you gave ocean water to a virus that doesn’t generally affect humans, it’s not going to suddenly make someone sick. So, this Laptev virus most likely did see humans in the past.”

“And that’s what Tally was saying earlier, with the ancient humans chasing the mammoths around, right?” said Rhonda.

“Hold on,” said Angela. “Sorry, guys, I meant to ask earlier, but I just want to clarify. So if a virus has never made humans sick before, then it’s not a danger to us now?”

“Generally speaking, yes, that’s right,” said Sarah.

“But, I don’t get it,” said Angela. “It had to have started with one human in the first place, right? I mean, it’s the old chicken and the egg problem. So why are you all so sure that Laptev had to have infected people in the past?”

“You can think of it as a numbers game,” said Rhonda, her deep voice commanding the attention of everyone in the room. “With the way the workers got sick, you know, so many within a few hours of touching the ice, it makes it extremely unlikely that the virus had not seen a human host before. As we were saying earlier, viruses aren’t active aggressors. They need the ‘key’ to get inside the locked door of the cell membrane in the first place. If Laptev had never seen humans, then it would not have been able to ‘unlock’ human cells so quickly and make so many people sick. The fact that Laptev was so virulent so quickly is proof that it must have already known how to infect humans.”

Angela looked doubtful.

“You know how once you’ve solved a tricky puzzle you’re more likely to get it right faster the next time you see it?” asked Miquela, blushing slightly.

“Sure, the whole ‘key’ thing,” said Angela. “But I still don’t think it makes sense.”

“Okay, so then let’s take it to a higher level,” she said, turning redder with each word. “If you have a team trying to go through an obstacle course, and they get to a series of puzzles that only one person knows how to solve, it’s going to take a while for that person to work with all the members of the team to show them how to solve it. But if the team has a bunch of people who have all seen that type of puzzle before, they’re going to resolve it quicker.”

“Got it,” said Angela, smiling.

Tally picked up the thread of the conversation again. “So, that raised another question which was: where did the virus come from in the first place, meaning, how did it get in the ice? It’s a pretty aggressive pathogen, so it probably did not exist in all human populations. Otherwise they would have all been decimated or perhaps we would have evolved with the virus and over the years, built up more immunity. So it makes sense that the Laptev was probably somehow more localized to that area. It’s a bit of long shot, but here’s what we came up with. We can assume that the early people who were in the area were probably taken ill with the virus. That pretty much has to be a given or otherwise there’s no explanation for how the virus would suddenly become so toxic to humans. But, where did these early people get it from?”

“That’s my question exactly,” said Angela, pointing a finger at Tally.

“When we explained about the mammoths migrating through the Laptev Bay area last week, we guessed that this theory was probably right and these early people were likely following them, hunting for food. Many tribes of nomads did that, so it makes a lot of sense. So it occurred to us that maybe the mammoths were carrying the virus, and perhaps when the prehistoric people killed the giant animals to eat them, they became infected in turn. And that’s when Drew had a brilliant idea.”