B News · Learn about the health risks of “zombie” viruses that awaken after 50,000 years

Virologists have been studying so-called “zombie viruses” for decades, pathogens that have been dormant for more than 50,000 years and can come back to life and infect humans as the planet warms. Information from the O Globo website.

Jean-Michel Claverie, a 73-year-old scientist, has spent more than a decade studying “giant” viruses, including those nearly 50,000 years old that were found deep in Siberian permafrost. Concerns that a warmer climate will release trapped greenhouse gases such as methane into the atmosphere as the region’s permafrost thaws have been well documented, but lurking pathogens pose a less-explored risk.

Last year, the scientist and his team conducted an investigation to extract several ancient viruses from permafrost, all of which were harmful to health and contagious, and there were 13 new viruses in total, including a virus frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago. According to him, viral infections from ancient and unknown pathogens in humans, animals or plants can have “catastrophic” effects.

According to the report, Claverie first showed that “live” viruses could be extracted from Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons, his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoeba, which are far enough away from humans. species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination.

“Fifty thousand years back it takes us to the time when Neanderthals disappeared from the region. He explained that if a Neanderthal died due to an unknown viral disease and this virus reappeared, it could pose a danger to us.

According to scientists, there is still no reason to panic. According to them, the risk of human exposure to ancient viruses is very low. The Arctic, where the permafrost is located, is a sparsely populated place, and they don’t know whether the frozen viruses would still be infectious when exposed to today’s conditions or whether they would find a suitable host.

In an attempt to prepare the world for a new pandemic disease, such as Covid, the World Health Organization coined the term “Disease X”, which represents a serious international epidemic that may be caused by a currently unknown pathogen.

In other words, it is a disease, and it is the next disease that will appear, but we do not know what it is, but we know that it exists and that the population must be prepared for it. The WHO’s goal was to find a way to get scientists to work on medical measures to prevent the emergence of unknown infectious threats through the development of new technologies such as vaccines and medicines.

Indicative evaluation: free