“You could put a yoghurt in permafrost and it might still be edible 50,000 years later.”īut the world’s permafrost is changing. “The crucial point about permafrost is that it is cold, dark and lacks oxygen, which is perfect for preserving biological material,” Claverie told the Observer last week.

Some layers have remained frozen for hundreds of thousands of years, scientists have discovered. Permafrost covers a fifth of the northern hemisphere and is made up of soil that has been kept at temperatures below zero for long periods. We have identified genomic traces of poxviruses and herpesviruses, which are well known human pathogens, for example.” “However, that does not mean that other viruses – currently frozen in the permafrost – might not be able to trigger illnesses in humans. “The viruses we isolated were only able to infect amoebae and posed no risk to humans,” said Claverie. Further research, published last year, revealed the existence of several different viral strains from seven different sites in Siberia and showed these could infect cultured cells. In 2014, Claverie led a team of scientists who isolated live viruses in Siberia and showed they could still infect single-cell organisms – even though they had been buried in permafrost for thousands of years. We have to assume that something like this could happen.” “We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. This point was backed by virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.” “By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. “At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north,” said geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University.

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. As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that would pinpoint early cases of a disease caused by ancient micro-organisms.

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