Proud to be a former flower child AND a former PAO staffer for both NASA and the US Naval Air Reserves. Now I'm a little old lady (LOL) with a laptop on a mountain top, just saying what I think.
Finally I have some attribution / evidence for what I've been trying to report since January 2021: See what I wrote and Posted 1.25.21 CofA Blog on the topic: "I don't know why no one mentions global warming connection to new viruses. They used to before Covid-19." TODAY we can all watch and read:
Scientists revive 48,500-year-old ‘zombie virus’ buried in ice
TRANSCRIPT:
We have all witnessed the horrors of what
one virus can do. The coronavirus brought the entire world to a grinding halt
and it took massive containment measures on a global scale that seemed to have developed
massively on a global scale to halt the virus.
That was just one virus. At its peak also
it's fatality rate was not more than four percent.
And now what would happen if the world
comes face-to-face with an even deadlier strain of an unknown virus?
Well there could be many such viruses
hidden deep within the permafrost. The permafrost
is a permanent frozen layer- under the Earth’s surface it consists of soil gravel
and sand usually bound together by ice.
And now our warming planet is causing the
glaciers to melt. What I mean to say is that
our protective white layer is melting more rapidly than we can imagine.
Earlier our main concern was the amount
of greenhouse gases being released from the frost melting away. But now we have a different concern all together. It is the release of dangerous ancient microbes
buried deep under the permanent frozen soil, and this is according to researchers
who’ve revived nearly a dozen viruses including one frozen under a lake nearly
forty thousand years ago in the Siberian region of Russia.
The researchers who have revived a number
of these zombie viruses, as they're now being called, have found the potential
revival of viruses could affect animals or humans.
Now this is quite problematic.
Moreover in a report published in Science
Alert the same was reiterated by the lead researcher. Jean M from the French National Center for Scientific
Research said that these reanimated viruses are potentially a significant threat
to public health although further study needs to be done to assess the danger that
these infectious agents propose, as they are eventually released into the atmosphere.
Now this is a cause of concern as a virus
is something that is neither living or dead. And it has a capability of being
dormant for many years.
But now with the permafrost melting away,
these viruses pose a significant threat to public health. And clearly it once again shows the perils of
playing with nature, and clearly more research is needed to evaluate the dangers
associated with climate change.
Now to understand what this means we are
now being joined by [SP?] Sarah Pitt from London, she is the principal lecturer
in Micro Biology at the University of Brighton in England. Welcome to the broadcast Sarah.
Hello.
Q:
So this is a unique finding, we are talking about what's being called
zombie viruses. Can you explain how such
viruses can survive for millions of years frozen in glaciers and ice; and how exactly
can they be brought back to life?
A:
Well as you were saying, because the permafrost is like a giant deep
freezer, a very low temperature deep freezer, viruses can survive under those
conditions if you keep them in a laboratory at minus eighty degrees. And they stay such that we can grow them
again once we thaw them out.
And viruses do need to live in an organic
material such as an animal that died, having- still carrying that infection.
And if that happens the animal is preserved
intact, and so are any infectious agents that might be inside it.
So as everything starts to thaw out, because
they've been perfectly preserved, all the cells inside the animal and tissues
inside the animal start to revive and the viruses that are inside them also can
revive, at the same time.
Q:
Sarah, also can you tell us how these viruses could infect other
organisms and spread rapidly even before we can find a way to negate them?
A:
The thing is if there are viruses which are thousands of years old, they
might be ones that we are not particularly familiar with. They might be closely related to something that
we have around now but it won't be something that we necessarily know.
So if animals or even human beings get
infected with those viruses, we might not recognize the symptoms. And we also might
not have the diagnostic tests ready to go quite soon enough. And then that's how things spead so rapidly.
As you were mentioning, we've just witnessed,
well we're still in the experience of covid.
It spread so rapidly because people didn't know the symptoms were different
from flu or a cold in good time. And then
it took us a while to develop a diagnostic test.
We did a really good job with coronavirus
because the SARS 2 virus is closely related to the SARS 1 and other sort of common
cold viruses. So we had a head start from
a diagnostic point of view.
Whereas if the viruses are thousands of
years old and we don’t know anything about them, it will take us a bit longer
to get the diagnostic tests. And so the virus
can really spread before we know it's there.
Q:
While this is a scientific discovery, it's a little worrying as
well. There's a question of ethics also that
comes into play, humans playing with nature can cause havoc, it's a recurring
theme in most Hollywood films, especially when you're talking about zombie
viruses.
Can you share how climate change poses
dangers which have not yet been figured out?
A:
In the same way that we don’t really know what's going to happen as the climate
across the world changes, with things thawing out that might have infectious
agents inside them. There's also a
potential risk of things like anthrax because of the spores, that's produced by
a very virulent bacteria that produces spores.
Again they can be inside animal skins and the bodies of humans have been
infected with it. They potentially survive for a very long time and very well
under frozen conditions, or just being deeply buried in the earth actually.
And another thing that can happen is
things like mosquitoes perhaps change their habits and their habitat, and they could
potentially start with global warming as the temperature starts warming up everywhere. And then also the wet. The thing is with global warming as we have rising
temperatures there's more rain and that produces more mosquitoes. And that could potentially cause them to
spread around the world and carry ZIKA virus or malaria to countries that didn't
previously have them because they didn't previously have the mosquito. So it's all in theory but it's something that
we do need to be aware of.
Q: Absolutely Sarah thank you for all those
insights and thanks for joining us on the climate tracker today
Nov 29, 2022 — The thawing of ancient
permafrost due to climate change may pose a new threat to humans, according to
researchers who revived nearly two ...
Dec 1, 2022 — French scientists have
revived a 48,500-year-old "zombie virus" buried under a frozen lake
in Russia. Scientists have long warned that the ...
Nov 29, 2022 — Scientists have long
warned that the thawing of permafrost due to atmospheric warming will worsen
climate change. But its effect on dormant ...
Nov 30, 2022 — French scientists have
revived a 48500-year-old "zombie virus" buried under a frozen lake
in Russia. Scientists have long warned that the ...
Nov 29, 2022 — To study the emerging
microbes, scientists have now revived a number of these "zombie viruses" from
Siberian permafrost. #ZombieVirus # ..
Nov 30, 2022 — When European researchers
examined ancient samples collected from permafrost in the Siberia region of
Russia. They revived and characterized ..
Nov 30, 2022 — French scientists have
revived a 48500-year-old "zombie virus" buried under a frozen lake
in Russia. Scientists have long warned that the ...
