Zombie Virus

In News

• Recently, the French scientists have warned of the onset of another outbreak after they revived a 48,500-year-old zombie virus buried under a frozen lake in Russia.
  • This has broken the previous record held by a 30,000-year-old virus discovered by the same team in Siberia in 2013.

What is a Zombie Virus?

• Zombie virus is the term given to a virus that is frozen in ice and therefore dormant.
• The virus emerged due to the thawing of permafrost as the global temperature is rising.
• It is a group of viruses which have been dormant for thousands of years. 
• It is dubbed Pandoravirus yedoma after the mythological character Pandora which was 48,500 years old and has the potential to infect other organisms. 
  • It was discovered below the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas in Yakutia, Russia.

What could be the cause of it?

• One-quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground which is referred to as permafrost.
  • Due to climate warming, irreversibly thawing permafrost is releasing organic matter frozen for up to a million years and most of which decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane which further enhances the greenhouse effect.
  • Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistoric times. 

Is the virus potentially harmful?

• All of the zombie viruses have the potential to be infectious and hence pose a health danger.
• It is believed that pandemics like Covid-19 will become more common in the future as melting permafrost releases long-dormant viruses.

Source: ET