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I was submerged on very-everyday-thoughts (should I wash my hair today or tomorrow...) when my telephone rang with a strange long number - a satellite telephone call form Russia. My collague Dorothee telling me "we have an anthrax epidemy here at the Yamal peninsula, could you try to find some information about it, we have no access to any communication but sat phone... Anthrax, it is a disease, used also as biological weapon..". So much for everyday-thoughts!

By that phonecall I had no clue whatsoever what anthrax is for something. You live you learn.

It prooved difficult to find reliable info about how to behave in such a situation... This news spred on the web, and most info that Norwegian health authorities could provide was directed to health personnell...
http://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/n0686-first-anthrax-outbreak-since-1941-9-hospitalised-with-two-feared-to-have-disease/
What can you do? You get hold of a professor who works with this kind of diseases in the arctic :) That prooved to be a good source of information, providing loads of facts and some guidelines about what one should consider.

Well, Doro and the group decided to evacuate the camp as they did not know how far and how large the outbreak was. But the epidemy has inspired a boom of news articles about melting permafrost uncovering also other dieaseses, like smallpox:http://www.livescience.com/2403-climate-threat-thawing-tundra-releases-infected-corpses.html (warning that link opens straight to a photo of a mummified human body)

or older stuff, like stone-age diseases that havent been encountered by humans for some thousands of years... https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25151-biggest-ever-virus-revived-from-stone-age-permafrost/

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