A new study says melting glaciers amid rising global temperatures could be the cause of an impending deadly epidemic.
By analyzing samples from Lake Hazen in the Arctic, scientists are investigating how climate change affects the risks of “dispersal and spread” — a virus jumping to another species.
They found that the chance of such an event spreads as glaciers melt, as meltwater can transfer pathogens to new hosts.
Deadly viruses, frozen in glaciers for hundreds of years, can reawaken as temperatures rise and the ice melts and flows into new areas.
Viruses need hosts such as humans, animals, plants or fungi to reproduce and spread, and sometimes they can transfer to a new host without immunity, as we saw during the Covid pandemic.
Experts warn that climate warming could lead to viruses connecting to new environments and hosts in the Arctic, increasing the risk of this ‘viral spread’.
The new study was led by researchers in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa in Canada and published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“The risks of spreading increase as glaciers melt,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “If climate change shifts the diversity of viral vector species and potential reservoirs northward, the high Arctic could become a breeding ground for emerging epidemics.”
The study says that many viruses, such as influenza A, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-2, have spread to humans in recent years, causing “severe disease.”
Evidence now shows that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats, although the virus is transmitted to humans by pangolins, a scaly mammal often mistaken for a reptile.
Similarly, the deadly Ebola outbreak that occurred in West Africa between 2013 and 2016 is believed to have originated in bats.
The researchers focused their work on soil and lake sediments from Lake Hazen, the world’s largest freshwater lake, in the Arctic.
The team took samples from the ground that became a melting glacial runoff in the summer, as well as from the bottom of the lake where the ice had to be removed or dug more than six meters deep.
They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediments from about 300 meters of water. Then the DNA, RNA, and genetic blueprints were drawn.
“This allowed us to know what viruses are present in a given environment and what potential hosts are present,” said study leader Stefan Aris-Brousseau, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa.
But to figure out how likely they are to be passed on to hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and each host’s family tree.
The similar lines indicate that the virus co-evolved with its host, but the differences indicate that it has spread, and if the virus jumps its host once, it is likely to do so again. .
The analysis found clear differences between the virus and its hosts at the bottom of the lake, which is directly related to the risk of spread.
Experts emphasize that they do not expect a real epidemic or a pandemic, and the probability of such an event “remains very low”.
They also caution that more work is needed to clarify how much difference between viruses and hosts is enough to create serious risks of spread.
The team is now looking for additional research and monitoring in the Arctic to “lighten” humans and other species.
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
