Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish for New and Deadly Microbes

Summary

The way these rooms are disinfected between patients, Lorin said, goes “beyond any terminal clean we’ve ever done in the history of the hospital.” He and his colleagues have published their protocol, for other hospitals to follow. “Gloves, toilet paper, paper towels—everything goes in the garbage,” Ulanda Wills, one of the hospital’s cleaners, told me. “Then we sanitize the room: bleach top to bottom, the ceiling and the walls in a clockwise direction.” Sometimes it takes two or three passes before the infection-prevention team gives the all-clear.We shuffled out of the room so that the head of the cleaning team could roll in an ultraviolet-light machine, called Space-1. Its four expandable arms emit enough UV radiation to break down microbial DNA; in two minutes, it can kill ninety-nine per cent of microorganisms. A window in the door began to glow neon blue. When the door opened again, I caught a whiff of what smelled like bleach and melted wax.Mount Sinai Brooklyn hasn’t had a C. auris outbreak since 2018. Yet no one who works there expects to eradicate the fungus. “Once you have the C. auris colonization, you’re always colonized,” George told me. Humans are a step behind: when microbes change, all we can do is react.One way to imagine the future of microbes is to look at their past. In March, I visited one of the world’s largest collections of ice cores, at the Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Scientists have long drilled cylinders of ice out of glaciers and ice sheets in search of details about Earth’s prehistory, such as ancient bubbles of air and particulates from the atmosphere. Only in the past few years did they realize that microbes were also preserved in ice cores.After zipping into a bright-orange parka, I stepped into a vast walk-in freezer that was thirty degrees below zero. My lungs tightened and my knees tensed. Long metal tubes filled with ice, some of it from glaciers that no longer exist, were stacked on rows of she...