Zombie virus in russia

“Every time we look, we will find a virus,” said Jean-Michel Claverie, a co-author of the study and an emeritus professor of virology at Aix-Marseille Université in France, in a phone interview. “It’s a done deal. We know that every time we’re going to look for viruses, infectious viruses in permafrost, we are going to find some.” Virologists who were not involved in the research said the specter of future pandemics being unleashed from the Siberian steppe ranks low on the list of current public health threats. Most new — or ancient — viruses are not dangerous, and the ones that survive the deep freeze for thousands of years tend not to be in the category of coronaviruses and other highly infectious viruses that lead to pandemics, they said. The risks from viruses pent up in the Arctic are worth monitoring, several scientists said. Smallpox, for example, has a genetic structure that can hold up under long-term freezing, and if people stumble upon the defrosted corpses of smallpox victims, there is a chance they could be infected anew. Other categories of virus — such as the coronaviruses that cause covid-19 — are more fragile and less likely to survive the deep freeze. “In nature we have a big natural freezer, which is the Siberian permafrost,” said Paulo Verardi, a virologist who is the head of the Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science at the University of Connecticut. “And that can be a little bit concerning,” especially if pathogens are frozen inside animals...

For more than 30,000 years, a giant virus lay frozen in northern Russia. It’s the largest virus ever discovered. And it’s not frozen any more. Even after so many millennia in cold storage, the virus is still infectious. Scientists have named this so-called “zombie” virus Pithovirus sibericum. “It’s quite different from the giant viruses already known,” Eugene Koonin told Science News. A biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md., he did not work on the new microbe. The word “virus” usually makes people think about illness. And viruses can cause a wide range of diseases, from the common cold to polio and AIDS. But there’s no need for people to panic about the new germ . The mega-virus appears toinfect only other single-celled organisms known as amoebas. This new virus can survive long periods in permafrost. These layers of soil stay frozen year-round. But climate change has begun to thaw permafrost in many regions. That could release other long-frozen viruses. And some of those may indeed pose a threat to people, warn the scientists who just unearthed the new giant virus. Biologists Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, at Aix-Marseille University in France, found the new germ. At 1.5 micrometers (about six hundred-thousandths of an inch), it’s about as long as 15 particles of HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — laid end to end. They describe it in a study published March 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Clave...

Permafrost is melting at rapid rates in the Russian Far East and could unleash unknown, long-dormant viruses. (Image credit: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Locked away in frigid Arctic soils and riverbeds is a world teeming with ancient microbes. Bacteria and viruses that existed thousands of years ago are frozen in time inside prehistoric layers of permafrost. Warming temperatures could cause much of the ice to melt and unleash these microbes from their frosty prisons. Once free, unknown pathogens could infect humans or other animals. "The risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming, in which permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will populate the Arctic,” Jean-Michel Claverie, a computational biologist at Aix-Marseille University in France who studies ancient and exotic viruses, told CNN. So far, scientists have only studied permafrost viruses that infect single-celled organisms called amoebas, because these viruses are harmless and provide a good model for others that may be lurking under the ice. "We will never risk isolating a virus eventually capable of infecting modern mammals," Claverie told Live Science in an email. "We do not have formal proof that viruses other than amoeba-specific viruses could survive as long, but there would be no reason why not, because all viruses basically have the same property of being inert particles while outside their host cells. We do not wish to take the immense risk...

A women dressed as a zombie poses during the Thrill The World 2009 event (Image from Getty) Is the ‘zombie’ virus real? Yes, the so-called zombie virus is real, but not in the sense many think. The ancient virus and its strains have been present for years owing to their ability to survive extreme conditions. However, these do not pose a direct threat to humans as they only infect amoeba. Professor of Genomics and Bioinformatics at the School of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University and director of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology, Jean, told He further established: “The accumulated differences in the functioning of human cells vs amoeba cells make these viruses incapable of infecting humans.” • ALSO READ: The notion of a zombie outbreak is fake Call it the influence of The Walking Dead or other similar fiction, but the mere thought of the dead coming to life is many people’s worst nightmare. When the news regarding the revival of the zombie virus broke, many assumed it had something to do with human zombies. Thus began the discussions on Twitter about the virus being real or not, just so one could attain some satisfaction.

As climate change accelerates the melting of ice in the Arctic, In a paper posted on the preprint server bioRxiv in November, scientists detail how they revived several of these viruses from the Siberian permafrost. The oldest is a 48,500-year-old pandoravirus, which set a world record for the age of a restored virus, co-author New Scientist’s Michael Le Page. All viruses the team uncovered infect only amoebas and therefore are not direct threats to public health. But they were still alive and able to replicate—an indication that dormant viruses dangerous to humans could also be revived from lurking in the ice. “If the authors are indeed isolating live viruses from ancient permafrost, it is likely that the even smaller, simpler mammalian viruses would also survive frozen for eons,” New Scientist. In fact, a deadly outbreak attributed to melting permafrost has already happened. In 2016, a “The public health risk is coming from the accelerated release of previously frozen viruses combined with increased human exposure, since global warming is also making Arctic areas much more accessible to industrial development,” Claverie tells Newsweek’s Pandora Dewan. However, Delwart tells New Scientist it's more likely that a zombie virus would circulate in wild or domestic animal populations than create a pandemic-scale outbreak in humans. Claverie and his colleagues have previously uncovered zombie viruses. Back in 2014, they revived a Permafrost covers about 24 percent of landmass s...