‘Zombie viruses’ in the Arctic could trigger the next pandemic, warns experts

We haven’t quite recovered from the last one, but experts now say that humanity could be faced with the threat of the next pandemic from an unlikely place — the melting permafrost in the Arctic region could release ancient viruses that could potentially affect humans.

These “zombie viruses,” also called Methuselah viruses after the biblical figure, have already been isolated by researchers who have raised concerns about a new global emergency, according to The Observer. To counter the potential of diseases from the distant past coming back to haunt us, scientists are proposing an Arctic monitoring network that could pinpoint early cases of a disease caused by ancient micro-organisms.

This network could also provide quarantine help and expert medical treatment for infected people in an attempt to prevent infected people from leaving the region.

“At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north. By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak,” geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University told The Observer.

Permafrost refers to the soil or underwater sediment that has been at temperatures below freezing for long periods of time. Some of the oldest permafrost has been frozen for around 7,00,000 years. It covers about one-fifth of the globe’s northern hemisphere and it is cold, dark, and lacks oxygen.

This makes permafrost excellent at preserving biological material. Last year, scientists brought microscopic worms back to life after they were frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years.

In 2014, Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University and a team of scientists isolated live viruses in Siberia and showed they could still infect single-cell organism despite the fact they have been buried in permafrost for thousands of years. Those viruses can only infect amoeba and pose no threat to humans, but it opens up the possibility of other dangerous viruses lurking in the permafrost.

According to Claverie, the researchers have identified genomic traces of poxviruses and herpesviruses in the permafrost, and those pathogens are known to infect humans.

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