Next Global Pandemic Could Emerge from Melting Glaciers, New Research Finds

By News.com.au

The risk of “viral spillover” – where a virus infects a new animal, or humans, for the first time – appears to be higher in an unexpected place, new analysis has found.

The risk of “viral spillover” – where a virus infects a new animal, or humans, for the first time – appears to be higher close to melting glaciers, new analysis has found.

Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the Arctic landscape of Lake Hazen, the largest lake inside the Arctic Circle.

And the findings suggest that ‘zombie’ viruses that have been frozen inside glaciers could come back from the dead as the ice melts, before infecting local wildlife moving closer to the poles as they warm up.

It may sound like something out of a science-fiction movie but it has already happened in the real world.

In 2016, an anthrax outbreak killed a child and infected at least seven other people in Siberia after a frozen reindeer carcass emerged from the ice. Anthrax had not spread in Siberia before then since 1941.

New research has suggested global warming could play a part in bringing viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of ‘viral spillover’.

Lake Hazen “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been”, researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at University of Toronto, told AFP.

The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for water from melted glaciers in the summer, then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.

“This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.

But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.

Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Basically what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.

Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover.

And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.

The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.

The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorise is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.

Those instead wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as increased water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.

“That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.

The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.

Researchers argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

“The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said. They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.

But they argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

“It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.

“It’s really unpredictable… and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable, it can range from benign to an actual pandemic.” The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.

“Obviously we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.