Could melting glaciers cause the next pandemic?

New data shows that the next pandemic may not come from birds or bats but from melting glaciers.

Genetic analysis of sediments from Lake Hazen, the world’s largest arctic freshwater lake, indicates that the risk of infecting new hosts for the first time is higher in melting glaciers. Watchman.

She points out that climate change, which is causing global temperatures to rise, increases the likelihood that viruses and bacteria frozen in permafrost and glaciers will return to the surface and infect wildlife.

In 2016, for example, an anthrax outbreak in northern Siberia was attributed to a heat wave that melted the permafrost and exposed infected reindeer carcasses from the last anthrax outbreak in the area in 1941.

He wanted to better understand the dangers of frozen viruses

Stefan Aris Prosso and colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada search it In soil and sediment samples from Lake Hazen, near areas where small and large amounts of meltwater flow from local glaciers.

They then sequenced the DNA and RNA in the samples to identify signatures that closely matched known viruses infecting animals, plants or fungal hosts, and then had an algorithm to assess the virus’s risk of infection with other organisms.

The researchers found that the risk of viruses spreading to new hosts is greater in places where there is meltwater from glaciers, and these places will increase as the climate warms.

There are unknown viruses in glaciers

Other research has recently shown that unknown viruses lurk in glaciers, for example, researchers at Ohio State University in the United States last year found genetic material from 33 new viruses, 28 of them in new ice samples taken from the Tibetan plateau in China. The virus is estimated to be about 15,000 years old.

However, Stéphane Aris-Brosou’s team cautions to expect a high risk of new viruses beginning to spread and create epidemics as long as they and their host animals are not present in the environment at the same time.

Climate change can affect

At the same time, climate change is expected to alter the presentation of existing species, which could cause new hosts to come into contact with old viruses.

“The only thing we can say for sure is that as temperatures rise, the risk of spreading in this environment increases,” Aris Brousseau told the Guardian.

He says he and his team don’t know at all if it will lead to epidemics.

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