Scientists have warned that humanity is facing a bizarre new pandemic threat. Ancient viruses frozen in Arctic permafrost could one day be released by Earth’s warming climate and cause a major disease outbreak, they say.
Strains of these Methuselah microbes – or zombie viruses as they are also called – have already been isolated by researchers who have raised fears that a new global medical emergency could be caused – not by a disease new to science, but by a disease from the distant past.
As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that could detect early cases of a disease caused by ancient microorganisms. In addition, it would provide quarantine and expert medical treatment for infected people in an effort to contain an outbreak and prevent infected people from leaving the region.
“Right now, pandemic threat analyzes focus on diseases that could emerge in the southern regions and then spread north,” says geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of the University of Aix-Marseille. “In contrast, little attention has been paid to an outbreak that could originate in the far north and then spread south – and that I think is a mistake. There are viruses that have the potential to infect people and cause a new disease outbreak.”
This point was supported by virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “We don’t know which viruses are out there in the permafrost, but I think there is a real risk that there is one that could cause a disease outbreak – for example an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this can happen.”
In 2014, Claverie led a team of scientists who isolated living viruses in Siberia and showed that they could still infect single-celled organisms – even though they had been buried in permafrost for thousands of years. Further research, published last year, revealed the existence of several virus strains from seven different locations in Siberia and showed that these could infect cultured cells. One virus sample was 48,500 years old.
“The viruses we isolated could only infect amoebae and posed no risk to humans,” says Claverie. “However, that does not mean that other viruses – currently frozen in the permafrost – may not cause disease in humans. We have identified genomic traces of, for example, poxviruses and herpesviruses, which are known human pathogens.”
Permafrost covers a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere and consists of soil that has been kept at sub-zero temperatures for long periods of time. Some layers have remained frozen for hundreds of thousands of years, scientists have discovered.
“The crucial point about permafrost is that it is cold, dark and devoid of oxygen, which is perfect for preserving biological material,” Claverie told the paper. Observer last week. “You could put yogurt in permafrost and it could still be edible 50,000 years later.”
But the world’s permafrost is changing. The upper layers of the planet’s most important reserves – in Canada, Siberia and Alaska – are melting as climate change disproportionately affects the Arctic. According to meteorologists, the region is warming several times faster than the average rate of global warming.
However, it is not the melting of the permafrost that poses the greatest risk, according to Claverie. “The danger comes from another effect of global warming: the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. That allows an increase in shipping, traffic and industrial development in Siberia. Massive mining operations are being planned, which will punch huge holes in the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores.
“These operations will release enormous amounts of pathogens that still thrive there. Miners come in and inhale the viruses. The consequences could be disastrous.”
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This point was emphasized by Koopmans. “If you look at the history of epidemic outbreaks, one of the main drivers has been land use change. The Nipah virus was spread by fruit bats that were driven from their habitat by humans. Similarly, monkeypox has been linked to the spread of urbanization in Africa. And that’s what we’re going to see in the Arctic: a complete change in land use, and that could be dangerous, as we’ve seen elsewhere.”
Scientists believe that permafrost – at its deepest level – could contain viruses that are up to a million years old and would therefore be much older than our own species, which is thought to have emerged around 300,000 years ago.
“Our immune system may never have come into contact with some of those microbes, and that’s another concern,” Claverie says. “The scenario that an unknown virus one day infects a Neanderthal and comes back to us, while unlikely, has become a real possibility.”
To that end, Claverie and others are working with UArctic, the University of the Arctic – an international education network in the Arctic – on plans to set up quarantine facilities and provide medical expertise that can identify early cases and treat them locally to try to contain the disease to keep under control. the infection.
“We are now facing a tangible threat and we must be prepared to deal with it. It’s that simple.”