Long-Dormant Viruses Are Now Waking Up After 50,000 Years as Planet Warms - Slas...
source link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/10/15/2221238/long-dormant-viruses-are-now-waking-up-after-50000-years-as-planet-warms
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Long-Dormant Viruses Are Now Waking Up After 50,000 Years as Planet Warms
Long-Dormant Viruses Are Now Waking Up After 50,000 Years as Planet Warms (yahoo.com) 84
Posted by EditorDavid
on Sunday October 15, 2023 @06:24PM from the dawn-of-the-undead dept.This week Bloomberg explored so-called "zombie viruses" — that is, long-dormant microbes which they call "yet another risk that climate change poses to public health" as ground that's been frozen for "milleniums" suddenly starts thawing — for example, in the Arctic, which they write is warming "faster than any other area on earth."
With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region's permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie's team published research showing they'd extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious...
Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it...
Claverie first showed "live" viruses could be extracted from the Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoebas, which are far enough removed from the human species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination. But he felt the scale of the public health threat the findings indicated had been under-appreciated or mistakenly considered a rarity. So, in 2019, his team proceeded to isolate 13 new viruses, including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples — evidence to their ubiquity. Publishing the findings in a 2022 study, he emphasized that a viral infection from an unknown, ancient pathogen in humans, animals or plants could have potentially "disastrous" effects. "50,000 years back in time takes us to when Neanderthal disappeared from the region," he says. "If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease and this virus resurfaces, it could be a danger to us."
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But OK. I need some new fears as the old ones are wearing thin.
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But OK. I need some new fears as the old ones are wearing thin.
Considering these are ~50,000 year old viruses, we humans may not have been exposed to them or, if we did, only in isolated communities. Any resistance or immunity may not exist in the wider population. Should they make their way toward densely populated areas, who knows how things will go.
This isn't fearmongering. This is an objective assessment of what might happen since we don't know how current human bodies would react to an ancient virus.
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"I do care about our country although."
By "our country" you certainly mean Russia.When was the last time anyone used "Trump derangement syndrome" in this way and didn't constantly suck Trump's mushroom cock? But sure, you don't care about Trump, other than that he hates the same people you do.
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That brings up an interesting thought. Have you ever wondered why social animals sneeze? I mean, sure, it's a method of clearing the nose, but it's also very good for spreading infection. Therefore, the immediate expectation is that sneezing would be selected against by evolution in any animals that live in family/clan groups in close quarters, including human beings. After all, if we spread contagious diseases, especially deadly ones, to our family group then our genes seem like they would be less likely t
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It's more like how diarrhea does spread viruses around but is the best chance your body had to expel a large amount of contagion to give yourself a fighting chance.
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It's an interesting theory, but you can just swallow mucus into your stomach and, in fact, even if your nose is running like crazy and you are sneezing frequently, you will still swallow a lot more mucus than comes out of your nose. You might be able to excrete contaminated fecal matter, but you simply can not sneeze out an infection. If your mucus is infected, the pathogen is already deep in your body.
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1. Bear in mind that our ancestors my have survived them by 90% of them dying off and the remaining 10% repopulating. While the overall survival of the human race over time is certainly a goal for us, avoiding mass die offs is also an important goal.
2. If it affected any of our direct ancestors 50,000 years ago, we certainly have not changed enough in that time that it would be unlikely to affect us. Now, it is possible that it will be a primitive form of something that's still around and that our immune sy
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"This isn't fearmongering. This is an objective assessment of what might happen since we don't know how current human bodies would react to an ancient virus."
It could be both, they aren't mutually exclusive. The article definitely is fear mongering, though.
"Any resistance or immunity may not exist in the wider population."
Maybe we could ask SuperKendall, he claimed to have special knowledge on viral immunity before.
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> Considering these are ~50,000 year old viruses, we humans may not have been exposed to them
Are you one of those people that think humans have only been here 6 thousand years?
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True, but it is not at all clear to me why a 50,000-year-old virus that did not manage to spread widely back then would be a bigger risk to us now than a mutation of a modern virus. Afterall, our ancestors were exposed to it, survived, and developed immunity and while that immunity has probably waned considerably (depending on how different the virus is to its modern offspring) we at least know that without any modern medicine, it did not wipe us out. New mutations come with no such guarantee.
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As a follow up, these viruses existed right around the time humans almost went extinct [businessinsider.com]. Guess what one of the ideas behind this near-extinction event is. A catastrophic spread of a disease.
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Going all out, it took a year to develop a vaccine for COVID and another year before the world wasn't production-limited. Modern medicine isn't a miracle. Indeed, we were fortunate that a lot of the groundwork for targeting the spike protein had already been done (for example, normally you can't have it isolated off the nucleocapsid as it folds into its fusion state, and even if that weren't the case, you wouldn't want it to be capable of going into its fusion state, as you don't want to risk syncytia; research had already found that you could "splint" it permanently into a non-fused state with double proline substitution).
I'm honestly a lot MORE concerned after I saw what happened with COVID. Take an example: imagine if HIV had been a highly contageous airborne disease like COVID rather than a STD. How would we have reacted?
When you first contract HIV, most people get symptoms like a bad case of the flu (not all that dissimilar to COVID). Then it subsides, and people feel fine. Had it it been highly contageous and airborne, we would have seen massive waves of flu-like illness sweeping through the non-resistant population, killing some of the vulnerable. We would have responded like we did to COVID, while starting to research it.
What would research have found? First, nothing. It's quite hard to detect latent HIV infection, esp. shortly after a person has been infected. Even when discovered, it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. People would have debated (like they still do to this day debate with COVID) whether long-term latent infection is a thing, or whether you're just looking at inactive remnants of the virus from the infection. Even when it became clear that it's a latent infection, would people have freaked out? We have all sorts of latent infections, from cold sores to chickenpox to Epstein-Barr, and we don't freak out about them so long as they don't seem to be doing anything. A very small percentage of the population might rapidly accelerate to AIDS, but it probably would have been seen as a rare side effect of infection in vulnerable individuals (like, say, MIS-C).
How would society have responded? Probably pretty much the same way as with COVID.
"I NEED A HAIRCUT!"
"STOP TAKING OUR FREEDOM!"
"IT'S JUST THE FLU!"
"STOP LIVING IN FEAR!"
"I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM!"
"OPEN UP!"And politicians, sooner or later, some places earlier than others, would have bowed to pressure to open up. Remember that with COVID, places some started opening back up as early as late spring / early summer 2020, like a third of a year into the pandemic, half a year at worst, when almost nothing was known about it. And a bit over a year in, tons of places opened fully or near fully. Would it have been any different in an "airborne HIV" situation, as per the above?
And then what would have happened? Almost the entire planet would end up with HIV, and when people start coming down with AIDS en masse, progress toward treatment would be minimal at best. In short: it'd be a veritable apocalypse.
Seeing human behavior in this pandemic does NOT fill me with confidence about future pandemics. Which can be expected to occur more and more often as global transportation increases and people push into ever-more remote areas - let alone if we start unintentionally resurrecting past viral threats.
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"Lasting immunity"
"I caught it and I'm fine."
Get it now and you can then just go live your life"
"This variant causes a milder flu than the others, you should try to catch this one." -
"...imagine if HIV had been a highly contageous airborne disease like COVID rather than a STD. How would we have reacted?"
Depends on who it kills, just like it did for HIV and COVID. If it kills gays, Republicans will celebrate, if it kills Democrats, Republicans will actively interfere with treatment. EXACTLY like happened for COVID and HIV. How we react depends on who is in charge and who is harmed, like always.
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Doesn't follow. The survivors might simply have been isolated from the infection and never exposed.
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Ok. Maybe you should actually lean how evolution and real science work before spouting off like this. Evolution does, indeed select for traits that helped individuals survive under particular circumstances, and those traits are passed on. You got that right. What you're missing is that just about everything in evolution is a tradeoff. There's almost always some sort of cost, whether it's just a mild metabolic cost or a biological disadvantage. For example, a propensity for sickle cell anemia goes hand in ha
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