Scientists fear that viruses frozen for more than 50,000 years could rear their heads again as the ice melts and cells are released from their preservation.
A French team of medical researchers fear more ‘zombie’ viruses resurrected from melting ice.
It comes after the team, from the University of Aix-Marseille, found a bug called “pandoravirus” in the melting permafrost of a frozen lake in Siberia.
Scientists believe this could be the oldest ‘living’ virus ever found, understood to have been trapped in the lake for more than 48,000 years.
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While this particular virus is not known to affect humans, the discovery could suggest that there are more potentially worrisome viruses lurking in the wasteful ice.
It’s a bit like a volcano ready to erupt, but instead the slow seepage of microbes into the landscape after years of dormancy.
“A quarter of the Northern Hemisphere lies beneath permanently frozen ground, known as permafrost. Due to climate warming, the irreversible thawing of permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years,” it begins the study.
“While the literature abounds with descriptions of the rich and diverse prokaryotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional reports of ‘live’ viruses have been published since the two original studies describing pitoviruses (in 2014) and molliviruses (in 2015 ).This erroneously suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report preliminary characterizations of 13 new viruses isolated from 7 samples different from ancient Siberian permafrost”.
While these scientists were looking at viruses that only infect single-celled organisms, there are fears that further research on the preserved remains of woolly mammoths could lead to an epidemic of animal-born (zoonotic) viruses, or even a pandemic.
Concern may seem high about a “distant threat,” but the situation is more acute than you might think. It was actually founded out of a child death in Siberia in 2016.
The boy was found to be infected with anthrax bacteria, a case linked to a small outbreak, associated with thawing permafrost, which revealed a preserved deer carcass harboring the bacteria.
More research is needed to accurately measure the threat of such an outbreak, and it is hoped that this study can stimulate a stronger interest in understanding how we can mitigate this problem.
Read related topics: Coronavirus