• Question: Is it possible for humans that live in space to become infected by microbes on other planets and what type of pathogens would we theoretically face?

    Asked by Ross McNeil on 1 Jan 2016.
    • Photo: Floris Van Den Berg

      Floris Van Den Berg answered on 1 Jan 2016:

      Hi Ross,

      IF there are microbes/virusses/bacteria in space, and they focus on the same point as their family from Earth, people might become infected.

      In a way this would be awesome news, cause it would mean that there is other life out in space. Next to the dangers ze know from Earth, other life forms could be harmfull as well, maybe the evolution of life on another planet took a completely different route..

      Floris

    • Photo: Steve Price

      Steve Price answered on 1 Jan 2016:

      Hi,
      As Floris says, if we found life somewhere else in the solar system that would be fantastic. We have not found life, yet, elsewhere in the solar system. There may well be life on other planets or moons, or there was life that has now died out, but we haven’t found it yet. We will keep looking.

    • Photo: Delma Childers

      Delma Childers answered on 3 Jan 2016:

      Great question, Ross! Floris and Steve are right on it. Funny enough, the Apollo missions to the moon were worried about this possibility. Neil Armstrong and several other Apollo astronauts all spent 21 days in quarantine because of worries that the moon might harbor unknown contagions (these procedures were dropped after Apollo 14 as all tests demonstrated no life present on the moon).

      My personal hunch is that perhaps the best example for what we might expect comes from studies of certain types of ‘zoonotic infections.’ In zoonotic infections, humans are an accidental host. Disease is usually transmitted in a cycle that goes between animals and an insect (say, ticks and deer, or mosquitoes and other animals). Quite often, humans are dead-end hosts, which means that transmission of the disease stops when it gets to us. But that doesn’t stop the infection from wreaking havoc with us. West Nile Virus is a classic example of this – it’s transmitted among birds by mosquitoes, but sometimes humans are infected after being bitten by a mosquito carrying the virus. The virus can cause serious, potentially life-threatening illness in humans, but it isn’t transmitted human-to-human, so we’re a dead end as far as the virus is concerned. My guess is that any pathogenic extraterrestrial microbe might behave in this way, as it hasn’t evolved with our immune system and I wouldn’t expect it to readily be able to spread human-to-human (like cold and flu can).

      The most likely threat comes from our own human microbiome – under the right (or severely wrong) conditions, many of the microbes on our skin or in our nose or gastrointestinal tracts could pose a health problem, and it’s simply not possible to sterilize a human being of microbes (technically, practically, and just a bad idea to even try as several microbes have a positive role in our day-to-day life).

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