As global warming accelerates, permafrost is rapidly thawing, releasing into the air a host of viruses stuck there since prehistoric times that could become contagious again.
An international group of scientists in the fields of genomics, microbiology and geosciences from Russia, Germany and France is sounding the alarm that “the risk of preserving the contagiousness of ancient viral particles” has been underestimated.
Scientists show that climate change and the melting of ice sheets at an alarming rate could cause some diseases that have been trapped in ice since prehistoric times and come from organisms thought to be extinct, namely ancient “zombie viruses” that still exist. ability to provoke infection and spread.
The team, which has been tracking resurrected “zombie viruses” for almost a decade, has published their findings in the journal Viruses.
Scientists have found that disease particles are still contagious today in the fur of mammoths, Siberian mummies, prehistoric wolves, and even lung flu victims buried in the frozen ground.
Institutions in Russia, Germany and France have been collaborating on a new study that found “the risk is bound to rise in the context of global warming as permafrost melt continues to accelerate.”
In recent decades, scientists have discovered many microbes in rapidly thawing permafrost fossils, and analysis has shown that “zombie viruses” may be making a comeback.
Below are six long-frozen viruses that scientists have found in the fossil record of rapidly thawing permafrost.
flu
Scientists have exhumed the body of an elderly Inuit woman buried in a mass grave of influenza victims near a remote village near the town of Brevig Mission in Alaska.
The permafrost has preserved enough influenza virus RNA for scientists to sequence the entire genome of the 1918 influenza virus strain.
The woman died of the virus in Canada, scientists said, but the discovery is an early sign of how easy it is to store deadly viruses in Arctic permafrost.
And pathologist Dr. Johann W. Hölten specifically looked for influenza samples that could help medical researchers better understand how to deal with future epidemics.
smallpox
According to the UN World Health Organization, smallpox was officially eradicated worldwide in 1980.
But in 2004, French and Russian scientists discovered smallpox inside a 300-year-old icy Siberian mummy frozen in the tundra of the Russian republic of Yakutia.
The mummy goes back to graves that were made during a smallpox outbreak in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in northeastern Siberia.
Each of the archaeological sites consisted of wooden tombs buried in permafrost, but the “unusual” smallpox grave contained five frozen mummies.
Individual burials were a traditional practice in the region at the time, and further analysis by scholars showed that bodies were buried quickly after death.
Siberian pitovirus
The size of the Siberian pitovirus is about 1.5 micrometers, which is seven times the size of modern human pitoviruses, which are typically 20 to 200 nanometers in size.
The ancient massive virus was first discovered in Siberian permafrost in 2014 at a depth of 100 feet (30 meters) and is one of the few viruses that can be seen under a normal light microscope, similar to a school microscope.
French scientists from the Aix-Marseille University National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS-AMU) have resurrected a 30,000-year-old Siberian “zombie pitovirus” by exposing sacrificial amoebas to the virus.
Professor Claverie of the National Center for Scientific Research at the University of Aix-Marseille said at the time: “This is the first time we see a virus that remains contagious after such a long time. The ease with which these new viruses have been isolated indicates that infectious virus particles from many hosts. Other untested eukaryotes, including humans and animals, may still be abundant in ancient permafrost.”
Wolf virus (Pacmanvirus lupus)
The “wolf” virus, an ancient relative of the African swine fever virus, was found dissolved in the intestines of a 27,000-year-old frozen Siberian wolf.
The remains of this Siberian wolf (Canis lupus) were found in the same area as the Yana River.
Like other large ancient viruses, the “wolf” virus (P. lupus) is still able to revive and kill amoebae.
Pandoravirus/Megavirus
Giant mammoth pandoravirus and mammoth megavirus have been found in a 27,000-year-old block of ice and frozen mammoth fur on the banks of the Yana River in Russia.
Both, like ancient giant viruses, have been shown to be capable of killing amoebas.
The scientists chose amoebas because these single-celled organisms are close enough to eukaryotic cells like those of humans and animals, but not close enough to risk creating another pandemic.
Source: Mirror
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