It didn't answer the most important question which is, Are they pathogenic?

There is a huge number of bacteria that do absolutely nothing to humans.

Is this one of them?

Maybe we just refreeze it and keep that a mystery. What part of 2026 has anyone thinking we’re going to have any kind of good luck this year? This ain’t the year to shoot your shot.

It did.

Psychrobacter SC65A.3 is a strain of the genus Psychrobacter, which are bacteria adapted to cold environments. Some species can cause infections in humans or animals.

If it’s not immediately obvious: The intended takeaway is that this particular strain probably isn’t pathogenic itself, but it’s completely plausible that such resistance can spread via HGT to pathogenic species, within the genus or not.

That didn't answer whether these particular bacteria are pathogenic.

Feed it to RFK Jr.

28 days later...

Well fuck. Add another contender to the apocalypse bingo, why not.

It does to the target audience.

What you’re missing is that Linnaean taxonomy breaks down when discussing bacteria, and the line between strain/species doesn’t really exist.

Bacteria swap a lot of genetic material asexually, including across dramatically different species. Pathogenicity can also be dramatically modulated by presence of other species and environmental conditions.

The idea of a particular strain or species of bacteria being inherently pathogenic in a binary yes/no way is a surprisingly flimsy and unhelpful one.

I don't want to know if these bacteria are potentially pathogenic. I want to know if they're pathogenic.

How are you distinguishing those ideas?

Are we talking about “has actually been found infecting human patients”?

It comes from a Cave at the northwest of Romania. So it may as well be a bacteria that turns you into a vampire or something...

Don't.

There are two scenarios:

1. he will spread it to his followers and it will kill millions
2. the brain worms will just eat the bacteria, rendering this whole test pointless

I thought the bear worm found nothing to eat so it died.

Yeah, I really didn't think that through. I guess we can't go testing them on random people.

Bears are notoriously scarce this time of year in places where most bears are. I suppose it's also generally difficult for worms to find things. Ever asked a worm for help finding your keys? They're terrible at that.

Even if we ignore any ethical concerns, when you’re sampling from an extreme environment, the strains you’re finding will, with >99.9% certainty, have substantially diverged from a biologically identical ancestor that’s spent a fair number of generations infecting hosts.

So you also get a weird Ship-of-Theseus type question of “are these still really the same bacteria?”. And if you assume they are going to be different strains after adapting to different environments, then you can also safely assume that whatever strain you’re sampling in an extreme environment has a >99.9% probability of being in the potentially-harmful, contextually-harmful, or non-harmful bucket, by virtue of the fact you found it isolated in the wild rather than in living hosts.

To put it a little more simply: if you’re looking for something with a demonstrated ability to infect people, you’ll probably find that inside or nearby people, not in an icy, remote cave.

Honey! New pandemic just dropped!!