Hamilton Tiger-Cats lose, but there may be polyextremophiles in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, if not the Dallol crater itself

Naturally, surrounded as I was by Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans in Thompson, Manitoba yesterday, and my contrarian chosen Hamilton Tiger-Cats already sadly declawed early in the second quarter, before a national television audience no less, the conversation turned to Ethiopian lakes and nearby locales that hold no life. OK, the analogy may not be quite perfect but close enough, and what else is one to do in a roomful of Westerners who think of places like Toronto and Hamilton as “down east”?

Turns out, while the Dallol crater and its so-called Black and Yellow lakes, located in the Ethiopian Danakil Depression, may not support life, other parts of the larger Danakil do. Or not. Take note Ticats fans.

The Danakil Depression is located more than 100 metres below sea level in a volcanic area in northwest Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, aptly named “Afar.” It is part of the East African Rift System, a place where the Earth’s internal forces are currently tearing apart three continental plates, creating new land, and it is arguably the hottest place on the planet, and one of the driest. Researchers in the field contend with sweltering heat, toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, and chlorine vapour that will burn their airways and choke their lungs without gas masks.

Picking up an article from the Madrid-based Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, the London-based Institute of Physics (IOP) on its physics.org website reported Nov. 22 that “Scientists find a place on Earth where there is no life.” The lede notes: “Living beings, especially micro-organisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on Earth, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline, hyper-acid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia.”

The article goes on to explain the “infernal landscape of Dallol, located in the Ethiopian depression of Danakil, extends over a volcanic crater full of salt, where toxic gases emanate and water boils in the midst of intense hydro-thermal activity. It is one of the most torrid environments on Earth. There, daily temperatures in winter can exceed 45 degrees Celsius and there are abundant hyper-saline and hyper-acid pools with pH values that are even negative” (https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-earth-life.html).

“A recent study, published this year, reports that certain micro-organisms can develop in this multi-extreme environment (simultaneously very hot, saline and acid), which has led its authors to present this place as an example of the limits that life can support, and even to propose it as a terrestrial analogue of early Mars.

“However, a French-Spanish team of scientists led by biologist Purificación Lopez Garcia of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has now published an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concludes otherwise. According to these researchers, there is no life in Dallol’s multi-extreme ponds.”

Lopez Garcia says, “After analyzing many more samples than in previous works, with adequate controls so as not to contaminate them and a well-calibrated methodology, we have verified that there’s no microbial life in these salty, hot and hyper-acid pools or in the adjacent magnesium-rich brine lakes. What does exist is a great diversity of halophilic archaea (a type of primitive salt-loving micro-organism) in the desert and the saline canyons around the hydro-thermal site, but neither is found in the hyper-acid and hyper-saline pools themselves, nor in the so-called Black and Yellow lakes of Dallol, where magnesium abounds. And all this despite the fact that microbial dispersion in this area, due to the wind and to human visitors, is in Thermaltense.”

Jasmin Fox-Skelly, a freelance science writer based in Cardiff, took a somewhat more upbeat approach a couple of years ago, but one based on older data, in her Aug. 4, 2017 piece “In Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid,” for BBC Future, which describes it website as “something different” in “a complex, fast-paced world of soundbites, knee-jerk opinions and information overload.” BBC Future says it provides a “home for slowing down, delving deep and shifting perspectives” on “almost every topic that matters.”

“In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air,” Fox-Skelly’s story opens. “Known as the ‘gateway to hell’, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life” (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid).

Fox-Skelly reported that Barbara Cavalazzi from the University of Bologna in Italy, part of a team conducting scientific expeditions in the area since 2013, found life in the Danakil Depression in March 2017, “after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are ‘polyextremophiles,” which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.”

So Spanish research? French research? Or Italian research? Life or no life (or some life) in the Danakil Depression?

You know, the sort of questions Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans were asking in their own ways for their applied football science research in Calgary yesterday, while the results were becoming demonstrably obvious on the field on each series of plays.

Science.

When I observed some of the Hamilton players appeared cold, someone helpfully suggested it was probably because the Ticats offence had been idling on the sidelines for so much of the game, and the Winnipeg defensive squad was likely in a similar predicament, even if not visibly showing it, Prairie stoicism and all.

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Potential for aerosal airbone transmission of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has been studied by U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland and in Canada at Special Pathogens Program Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba

In an op-ed article, “What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola,” published in the New York Times Sept. 11, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, wrote the Ebola scenario “virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

“If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.”

In fact, there has already been some antigenic drift  in the current novel Ebola-Zaire (EBO-Z) subclade from viral samples sequenced in Sierra Leone in June and sequences from Guinea in March three months earlier.

Osterholm is also an international expert on American preparedness for an influenza pandemic, and from 2001 to 2005, served as a special advisor to then–U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on issues related to bio-terrorism and public health preparedness.

Ebola virus causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever with a high fatality rate estimated at about 70 per cent on average. Five Ebola virus species within the genus Ebolavirus are known, including four that cause Ebola virus disease (EVD) in humans:  Zaire, Bundibugyo, Sudan and Taï Forest, while Reston.  the fifth species, has only caused disease in non-human primates.  The current outbreak in West Africa, plus a handful of travel-related additional cases in Madrid in Spain and in the United States in Dallas and New York City, is Ebola Zaire, the deadliest form of the disease in previous outbreaks with case fatality rates of 90 per cent reported.

With more than 10,000 reported cases and more than 5,000 people dead (for what is widely believed to be a vastly under-reported case fatality rate of about 50 per cent), the 2013-14 outbreak  in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone,  Mali, Nigeria and Senegal in West Africa, caused by Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus species), is the 20th, largest and most complex outbreak of EVD in its 38-year history, with more cases and deaths in this outbreak than all others combined, since the disease was first discovered in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks, one in Nzara in Sudan, and the other in Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was then called Zaire, where a Belgian Roman Catholic nun at a small mission hospital was infected. The latter occurred in a village near the Ebola River in what was then northern Zaire, from which the disease and species both takes their  names. When those first cases were reported in the mid-1970s they were from remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests. The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier this month the Ebola outbreak is now over in both Nigeria and Senegal, although the disease is threatening  the Ivory Coast,  which shares a 716-kilometre international border with Liberia in the southwest; a 610-kilometre border with Guinea to the northwest; and a 532-kilometre border with Mali to the north and northwest.

It began last December with an index case in Meliandou, in southeastern Guinea, not far from the borders with both Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Two decades ago, scientists at the  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), based  at Fort Detrick, Maryland, exposed  monkeys to airborne Ebola, which “caused a rapidly fatal disease” in four to five days, they  concluded in their 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology.

The  researchers hypothesized Ebola can spread through air but likely hasn’t in Africa because the equatorial region is generally too warm, with temperatures rarely dropping below 18.3°C or 65°F.

In 2012, Canadian researchers here in Manitoba, led by Gary Kobinger, head of Special Pathogens and Vector Design and Immunotherapy at the Special Pathogens Program of the  Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada on Arlington Street in Winnipeg, along with researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs, which can remain largely healthy and carry Ebola with only minor ill effects, including heavier breathing and mild fever, to monkeys where the disease was fatal, indicating the Ebola virus may spread between species through the air, although the researchers could not  say for certain that is how the transmission actually occurred. Their research was published in  Scientific Reports 2 on Nov. 15, 2012.

The Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg is where some of the world’s deadliest pathogens  – such as Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses and Nipah Virus Encephalitis  – are studied.

In December 1989,  not far away from USAMRIID, in a strip mall in Isaac Newton Square in suburban Reston, Virginia, army scientists  from nearby Fort Detrick, Maryland were called in when monkeys from the Philippines,  kept by Hazelton Research Products for shipment to other U.S. laboratories,  began to die in their cages, one by one, after contracting what is now known as Reston ebolavirus species, the only known form of Ebola that causes disease only in in non-human primates. While the Reston Ebola species can infect humans no one got sick in Virginia 25 years ago and no serious illness or death in humans have been reported to date as a result of human exposure to the the Reston Ebola species. The Reston episode would become a key part of author Richard Preston’s electrifying 1994 non-fiction thriller, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, an earlier version of which had appeared in The New Yorker magazine on Oct. 26, 1992 as “Crisis in the Hot Zone.”

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says in its “Review of Human-to-Human Transmission of Ebola Virus” summary of published information on the current science that “airborne transmission of Ebola virus has been hypothesized but not demonstrated in humans. While Ebola virus can be spread through airborne particles under experimental conditions in animals, this type of spread has not been documented during human EVD outbreaks in settings such as hospitals or households.”

Referring to the USAMRIID experiment that provided the data for the 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology, CDC says, “In the laboratory setting, non-human primates with their heads placed in closed hoods have been exposed to and infected by nebulized aerosols of Ebola virus.”

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