Threat of outbreak from microbes trapped in permafrost for millennia raised by increased Siberian shipping activity
Humanity is facing a bizarre new pandemic threat, scientists have warned. Ancient viruses frozen in the Arctic permafrost could one day be released by Earth’s warming climate and unleash a major disease outbreak, they say.
Strains of these Methuselah microbes – or zombie viruses as they are also known – have already been isolated by researchers who have raised fears that a new global medical emergency could be triggered – not by an illness new to science but by a disease from the distant past.
As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that would pinpoint early cases of a disease caused by ancient micro-organisms. Additionally, it would provide quarantine and expert medical treatment for infected people in a bid to contain an outbreak, and prevent infected people from leaving the region.
Many viruses have many different hosts.
The original vaccine was created for smallpox after observing that dairymaids who contracted cowpox (infected their herd) did not get smallpox.
Another good example is influenza. It attacks birds, swine, cows, horses, bats plus many others. Some strains are species specific, other can jump host easily.
Covid showed itself to have a wide host range.
All it would take is a snow goose picking up the disease in the artic and transmitting it to a pig, and we’d be in trouble.