French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after reviving a “zombie virus” thatrapped under a frozen lake in Russia for a record 50,000 years.
According to the preliminary paper, global warming is causing vast swaths of the permafrost — permanently frozen ground covering one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere — to irreversibly thaw. This has had the alarming effect of “releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years” — including potentially harmful pathogens.
Aix-Marseille University professor Jean-Michel Claverie, co-author of the study, issued a warning to medical authorities about the lack of significant updates on “live” viruses in permafrost since original studies in 2014 and 2015,. “This wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that ‘zombie viruses’ are not a public health threat,” the research team wrote in their findings.
After studying the live cultures, scientists found that all the “zombie viruses” have the potential to be infectious, and are therefore a “health threat.” They postulate that we could see morein the future as ever-melting permafrost continues to release long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America.
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