The enemy from within. According to a recent study carried out by Dr. Stéphane Aris-Brosou and his colleagues at the University of Ottawa in Canada, whose conclusions are collected in the columns of the guardian, the next pandemic to hit humanity could come from melting ice, which could release viruses and bacteria hitherto locked up in glaciers and permafrost. These could attack local wildlife.
What impact on humans?
To reach this conclusion, the researchers took soil and sediment samples from Lake Hazen, the world’s largest high Arctic freshwater lake, near where small, medium and large amounts of local glacial meltwater flowed.
After these samples, the scientists sequenced the RNA and DNA of these samples, to compare them with those of known viruses thanks to an algorithm established by them. According to them, the risk of spreading these viruses to new hosts is much higher in places where large amounts of water flow. A phenomenon that, with the increase in temperature, will tend to increase.
“The only thing we can be sure of is that as temperatures rise, the risk of melting in that particular environment increases. Will that lead to pandemics? We have no idea,” says Dr Aris-Brosou in British media columns. .
The latter also ensures that the work has not yet revealed how many viruses have been identified and, above all, how many of them are unknown to science. However, this should be done in the coming months, after new work should define whether or not they are capable of triggering an infection on a human scale.
This is not the first time that scientists have been interested in these viruses, sometimes called “zombie viruses”. In 2015, a 30,000-year-old “super virus” was found in Siberia, in the permafrost, the permanently frozen soils of the Russian province. Since then it has been observed in laboratories.
Source: BFM TV
