World War Z, I Am Legend and more recently The Last Of Us seem to have sent the wrong message. A pandemic that continues to wreak havoc on the planet has not served as an alarm either. There is scientists who are spinning a fine line between research to know and prevent, or cause global chaos like the one that occurred in the aforementioned productions.
A team of experts from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Aix-Marseille in Marseille, France began a focused investigation on the permafrost. With this arctic region heating up four times faster than the rest of the planet, organisms that lie beneath the ice sheet deep underground are re-emerging.
So this scientific team led by Professor Jean-Michel Claverie isolated and analyzed samples of various virus strains taken from seven different locations in Siberia. They showed that each was capable of infecting cultured amoeba cells.
According to a report published CNN there are five new families of viruses (Welcome?). The oldest has a date of about 48,500 years and the youngest 27,000 years. Experts are surprised that the strains still have the ability to continue infecting so long after.
So, they issue alerts towards the preservation of the environment and avoid the actions that generate global warming. The fact that the permafrost is freezing creates new dangers for humanity.
Professor Claverie is a zombie virus hunter. He calls them this way for two characteristics: firstly, they are strains that are thousands of years old on the planet and secondly, he makes them infectious by inserting them into cultured cells.
Is that dangerous? Of course. But in general terms the scientist does it with unicellular organisms and not in animals or humans. The idea is to be aware of everything that surrounds us and the future consequences that the thawing of the permafrost could bring.
“We see these amoeba-infecting viruses as surrogates for all other possible viruses that might be in the permafrost. We see the traces of many, many, many other viruses. So we know they are there. We don’t know for sure if they are still alive. But our reasoning is that if the viruses that attack the amoebas are still alive, there is no reason why the other viruses are not still alive and capable of infecting their own hosts,” the scientist said in an interview with CNN.
Different viruses that have attacked the human race and some animals in our history have been attributed to thawing in the permafrost. The most recent, an Anthrax outbreak in 2016 that affected dozens of people and approximately 2,000 reindeer in an area of Siberia that was affected by unusually high levels of temperature.
Certainly the work of Professor Jean-Michel Claverie and his team is prevention. But we have already seen how science fiction teaches us that this is how things go wrong.