Essay by Eric Worrall
Aix Marseille University Professor Emeritus Dr Claverie explaining how ancient mammoth viruses released by melting permafrost could make us sick.
Could a frozen ancient virus thawed by climate change cause the next pandemic?
ABC RN / By Sam Nichols for Future Tense
Climate change threatens human life in many ways but one of the less obvious could be a rise in pandemics.
A warming climate could release ancient pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, that have been frozen in permafrost in the polar regions for millennia, Jean-Michel Claverie tells ABC RN’s Future Tense.
“We know for certain that bacteria can remain dormant but alive for probably up to 500,000 years in permafrost. And so at that point, this is the very beginning of Homo sapiens. Our species was just emerging [at that time],” says the emeritus professor of medicine at France’s Aix Marseille University.
Dr Claverie and his team of researchers recently published their findings on seven ancient viruses found in Siberia’s permafrost. One was almost 50,000 years old and still infectious.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-09/ancient-viruses-climate-change-global-pandemic-risk/102277398
The abstract of the study;
An update on eukaryotic viruses revived from ancient perma- 2
Jean-Marie Alempic 1#, Audrey Lartigue 1#, Artemiy E Goncharov 2, Guido Grosse 3,4, Jens Strauss 3, Alexey N. 4 Tikhonov 5, Alexander N. Fedorov 6, Olivier Poirot 1, Matthieu Legendre 1, Sébastien Santini 1, Chantal Abergel 1 , 5 and Jean-Michel Claverie 1,*
6
- 1 IGS, Information Génomique & Structurale (UMR7256), Institut de Microbiologie de la Méditerranée 7 (FR 3489), Institut Microbiologie, Bioénergies et Biotechnologie, and Institut Origines, CNRS, Aix Marseille 8 University, Marseille, 13288, France 9
- 2 Department of Molecular Microbiology, Institute of Experimental Medicine, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 10 Department of Epidemiology, Parasitology and Disinfectology, Northwestern State Medical Mechnikov 11 University, Saint Petersburg, 195067, Russia 12
- 3 Permafrost Research Section, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, 13 14473, Potsdam, Germany 14
- 4 Institute of Geosciences, University of Potsdam, 14478 Potsdam, Germany. 15
- 5 Laboratory of theriology, Zoological Institute of Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg, 199034, 16 Russia. 17
- 6 Melnikov Permafrost Institute, 677010 Yakutsk, Russia 18 19
# These authors contributed equally. 20 * Correspondence: Jean-Michel.Claverie@univ-amu.fr; Tel.: +33 413946777 21
Abstract: One quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, re- 22 ferred to as permafrost. Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing or- 23 ganic matter frozen for up to a million years, most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and 24 methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect. Part of this organic matter also consists of revived 25 cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant 26 since prehistorical times. While the literature abounds on descriptions of the rich and diverse pro- 27 karyotic microbiomes found in permafrost, no additional report about “live” viruses have been pub- 28 lished since the two original studies describing pithovirus (in 2014) and mollivirus (in 2015). This 29 wrongly suggests that such occurrences are rare and that “zombie viruses” are not a public health 30 threat. To restore an appreciation closer to reality, we report the preliminary characterizations of 13 31 new viruses isolated from 7 different ancient Siberian permafrost samples, 1 from the Lena river 32 and 1 from Kamchatka cryosol. As expected from the host specificity imposed by our protocol, these 33 viruses belong to 5 different clades infecting Acanthamoeba spp. but not previously revived from 34 permafrost: pandoravirus, cedratvirus, megavirus, and pacmanvirus, in addition to a new pithovi- 35 rus strain.
Read more: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2022/11/10/2022.11.10.515937.full.pdf
Given our ancestors survived 10s of thousands of years of close contact with living mammoths, and millennia of melting ice after the end of the last ice age, I think we’ve already been exposed to pretty much everything mammoths have to offer.
I suggest genetically enhanced viruses being grown in Chinese laboratories with allegedly lax biosecurity are more of a threat to global health, than the risk from a reindeer herder stubbing his toe on a dead mammoth.
Do we commonly catch viruses from elephants?
No.
Crossover tends to come from the sister group to our superorder (Euarchonotglires or Supraprimates), Laurastheria, which includes bats, carnivorans, pangolins, ungulates, whales, etc. These two superorders form magnaorder Boreoeutheria. Bats and bovids are especially dangerous zoonotic pathogen sources.
However, you are advised not to play with the dinosaurs. I have it on good authority: “My Brother Was An Only Child.”
“A warming climate could release ancient pathogens” and I could get run over by bus whilst sitting in my living room. I suspect the odds are about the same.
Sounds like someone has been watching too many sci-fi movies….
The permafrost has not stopped melting and freezing again and again for these last 12000 years because the Holocene was a suite of cold and warm periods.
One can be certain that if the wooly mammoths were infested by these purported viruses, these last ones didn’t wait until the 21th century for spreading in the animal reign.
This claim of Dr Claverie’s team is a nonsense:
Etc…
No wonder ice sheets melted so rapidly.
Charles the 3rd’s father, the Duke of Edimbourg, dreamed he would die and re-incarnate in a deadly virus that would kill half of the world’s population.
“Nice try Philip-Covid, but you weren’t deadly enough… You should much more upgrade your lethality and try again, don’t lose hope ! Ask Wuhan laboratories, certainly they will help you.”
Apparently Philip’s attitude was very much modified by Ian Plimer, leading Australian geologist and author of “Green Murder”. King Charles of the climate clowns will be a bigger problem.
Now Britain is saddled with the jug-eared nitwit twits of the odious Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg dynasty for at least three generations.
Are there no standards for science anymore? How on earth can stuff like this get financed or published? It is crap.
If it is climate related and scary, it gets financed and published. That is what alarmists do. At least this paper did not commit academic misconduct like Marcott did in Science in 2013, or O’Leary, or Fabricius, or PMEL. All well documented in essays in ebook Blowing Smoke.
It was rather nice of the lead authors, Jean-Marie Alempic and Audrey Lartigue to include their retired colleague in the credits.
Major contributing factors to thawing mammoths are: removed vegetation revealing sink holes; & fossil hunters using pumped water to accelerate the extractions.
Ref: Episode of “Expedition unknown”.
Is this a long-nosed Pinocchio story?
“I suggest genetically enhanced viruses being grown in Chinese laboratories with allegedly lax biosecurity are more of a threat to global health, than the risk from a reindeer herder stubbing his toe on a dead mammoth.” Amen, oh by the way NIH is still financing Corina virus gain of function research. Out so called elites never learn and don’t give a damn about us peons.
I’ll put this new fear on my list of top 10,000 things to worry about- at the bottom of course. 🙂
This threat is new? Placer gold mining in the Klondyke began in the late 1800s, and continues. Miners have been discovering mammoth tusks ever since and there has been no unique infections.,
” Climate Change Could Cause Us Catch a Nasty Wooly Mammoth Virus ”
Seriously?
And what about fleas and lice? For sure Climate Change TM will increase them too!
Clearly we need to be more worried about irresponsible scientists with very poor judgment trying to make mostly innocuous viruses more dangerous to humans.
Mammoth carcasses are frequently found along the waterways of western interior Alaska. They are not now or ever have been imbedded in permafrost. There doesn’t seem to be any fear among the local Athabascans of being infected by whatever agents these cadavers might contain. They dig them up and try to profit from the tusks and bones.