Are Ancient Viruses Waiting In the Melting Arctic Ice?
Wired reports that the next flu pandemic may be hibernating in an Arctic glacier or frozen Siberian lake, waiting for rising temperatures to set it free. Then birds can deliver it back to civilization. Apparently new research shows that viruses can go into hibernation, hiding in ice when earlier generations of humans, birds, or other hosts developed immunity…with the ability to reemerge hundreds or thousands of years later.
Apparently, “scientists have in fact detected influenza viruses frozen in the ice and mud of lakes in Alaska, Siberia and elsewhere, the summer grounds for ducks that migrate to China, Southern Asia, Europe and North America. Many other viruses may have evolved to lay dormant in ice when their host populations develop resistance…waterborne viruses such as polio, hepatitis A..even smallpox — a virus against which Americans are no longer routinely vaccinated — might survive in the bodies of victims buried in Arctic permafrost.”
What plagues of the past are waiting to emerge as the Arctic ice melts?
