Zombie virus: What is it and how climate change can trigger its spread

Scientists have revived the ‘zombie’ virus from the Arctic’s permafrost that was trapped for 48,500 years, the Euro News reported.

In a recently published study, French researcher Jean-Michel Claverie and his team claimed that they managed to isolate and revive several ancient viruses from the permafrost, including a giant virus strain (Pithovirus) found in a 27,000-year-old permafrost sample containing a lot of mammoth wool. And most of the virus isolates were of the Pandoraviridae family, a family of double-stranded DNA viruses that infect amoebae, the report said.

“This study confirms the capacity of large DNA viruses infecting Acanthamoeba to remain infectious after more than 48,500 years spent in deep permafrost,” the study revealed.

What are Zombie viruses?

Viruses that have been buried under the Arctic ice caps or permafrost anywhere on the Earth, and are capable of unleashing a deadly strain that the human population may not be equipped to deal with are labelled as Zombie viruses.

Permafrost is the permanently frozen layer below Earth’s surface. And rising temperatures due to global warming have caused the Arctic ice to melt.

Scientists have warned that “Zombie” viruses that spent up to 48,500 years frozen in the ground could reawaken as the permafrost melts due to rising temperatures.

Why have Scientists revived this Virus? And what danger can it pose?

The concern that the eventual rise in global warming and climate change may cause the permafrost to melt and such viruses may resurface has lead scientists to study them in order to find a possible cure in case a lethal strain is released.

To play safe, Claverie and his team have revived prehistoric viruses that target single-celled amoebae, rather than animals or humans. “Without the need to embark on such a risky project, we believe our results with Acanthamoeba-infecting viruses can be extrapolated to many other DNA viruses capable of infecting humans or animals,” they explained.

“Fortunately, we can reasonably hope that an epidemic caused by a revived prehistoric pathogenic bacterium could be quickly controlled by the modern antibiotics at our disposal [...] even though bacteria carrying antibiotic-resistance genes appear to be surprisingly prevalent in permafrost,” a study published in February in the journal Viruses said.

The scientist however warned that “the situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus” for which there might be no specific treatment or vaccine available.

The report pointed out that the already melting of permafrost in Siberia has been linked to anthrax outbreaks in reindeers.