by A strange new pandemic is threatening humanity, scientists have warned. Earth’s warming climate could one day unleash ancient viruses frozen in Arctic permafrost and unleash a major disease outbreak, they say.
Layers 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 triggered – not by a new illness in science but by a disease from the past. .
As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that would reveal early cases of disease caused by ancient microorganisms. In addition, it would provide quarantine and expert treatment for infected people to contain an outbreak, and prevent infected people from leaving the region.
“Currently, analyzes of pandemic threats focus on diseases that may arise in southern regions and then spread north,” said geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie from the University of Aix-Marseille. “In contrast, very little attention has been paid to an outbreak that could develop in the far north and then travel south – and that, I believe, is an oversight. There are viruses here that could infect people and start a new outbreak of the disease.”
Virologist Marion Koopmans from the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam supported this point. “We don’t know what viruses are out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there could be one that could cause a disease outbreak – say an ancient form of polio. We have to accept that something like this could happen.”
In 2014, Claverie led a team of scientists who isolated live viruses in Siberia and showed that they could still infect single-celled organisms – even though they had been frozen for thousands of years. Further research, published last year, revealed the existence of several different viral 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 were only capable of infecting amoebae and did not pose a risk to humans,” Claverie said. “However, that does not mean that other viruses – currently frozen in permafrost – may not be capable of causing illness in humans. We have identified genomic traces of poxviruses and herpesviruses, which are known human pathogens, for example.”
Permafrost covers one fifth of the northern hemisphere and is made up of soil that has been kept at sub-zero temperatures for long periods. Some layers remained frozen for hundreds of thousands of years, scientists discovered.
“The key point about permafrost is that it’s cold, dark and oxygen-free, which is perfect for preserving biological material,” Claverie told the 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 main 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 increase in global warming.
However, melting permafrost isn’t exactly the cause of the most immediate risk, Claverie added. “The danger comes from another global warming effect: the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. This allows for increases in shipping, traffic and industrial development in Siberia. Massive mining operations are being planned, and they are going to drive huge holes into the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores.
“Those operations will release huge amounts of pathogens that still thrive. Miners will walk in and inhale the viruses. The effects could be devastating.”
Koopmans emphasized this point. “If you look at the history of epidemic outbreaks, one of the main drivers is land use change. Fruit bats spread the Nipah virus that were driven from their habitats by humans. Similarly, there is a link between monkeys and the spread of urbanization in Africa. And that’s what we’re about 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 levels – may harbor viruses that are up to a million years old and much older than our own species, which is thought to have emerged around 300,000 years ago.
“Maybe our immune systems have never been exposed to some of those microbes, which is another concern,” Claverie said. “While it is unlikely that an unknown virus that infected Neanderthals is coming back to us, it is now a real possibility.”
For that reason, Claverie and others are working with UArctic, the University of the Arctic – an international educational network in the Polar region – on plans to establish quarantine facilities and provide medical expertise that could find and treat early cases. on them locally to try to curb them. the infection.
“We now face a tangible threat and we must be prepared to deal with it. It’s as simple as that.”
