Permafrost, also called permafrost, is the part of the ground that remains frozen permanently, and which has been so for centuries … Due to global warming, the ground warms and melts to this very deep layer of ice. , especially since large fires are waking up, especially in Siberia (where it was 20 degrees warmer than normal last June). Results ? The permafrost disintegrates and gradually releases everything it contains, as Le Parisien explains who describes it as “a viral and bacterial time bomb“.
What it contains are mainly viruses and bacteria, some of which are still unknown. So the current fear of scientists is that their release will lead to other health crises such as that of the coronavirus. A French biologist explains to the Parisian, that some viruses 30,000 years old could be exhumed and keep their infectious power intact. After studies on the issue, Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel realized that global warming could even release these viruses dating from the Neanderthals, against which we have no remedy.
Permafrost pauses viruses, which are still active when they wake up
This scientist explains that permafrost put bacteria on pause, but thatwhen in contact with light and heat, when the ice becomes liquid again, they wake up and resume service. For now, as the process is very slow, the oxygen in the air still manages to sterilize the waking up bacteria. But scientists are worried about the desire of great powers such as Russia to go and exploit these mining areas. This would speed up the process, preventing the oxygen from doing its job.
Anthrax released by melting ice kills one
In 2016 in Siberia, a 12-year-old boy died of an intestinal anthrax infection. The bacteria stored in the permafrost would have been released by a partial melting of this frozen soil, according to The Siberian Times. The 12-year-old boy lived with a nomadic family on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia. He had been contaminated with the bacteria Bacillus anthracis, which would have been kept in the frozen ground and released when it melted. The summer of 2016 – when exceptionally high temperatures had been recorded in the Yamal peninsula (34 ° C instead of the 15 ° C usually recorded in this season) – 90 people had been hospitalized for anthrax contamination, revealed this newspaper. While two-thirds of them had developed forms of cutaneous anthrax that were easier to treat, the others suffered from more complex intestinal forms.
According to scientists, bacteria have therefore dozed in permafrost since 1941, the year of the last anthrax epidemic in Siberia, before being released when the soil partially melted and woke up. like a “zombie” in contact with the air. Anthrax first claimed victims among reindeer populations which absorbed it by grazing on grass or drinking in rivers. The Russian authorities had incinerated the 2,400 deer corpses found to destroy the bacteria and its spores, and thus limit the risk of contamination. They had also vaccinated more than 4,500 reindeer against this bacillus.
The return of smallpox?
The smallpox, it is a virus that was thought to be eradicated forever. A real monster, which caused the death of more than 300 million people in the 19th century. Since 1980 and thanks to the vaccination campaigns orchestrated by the World Health Organization (WHO), smallpox has disappeared: the last strains of the virus are carefully stored in two high-security laboratories.
“We discovered giant viruses in the remains of mammoths, explained at a press conference in 2016, Viktor Maleev, deputy director of the Russian epidemiology research institute. There are remains of smallpox dating from the 19th century, for example. ” For his part, the epidemiologist Arnaud Fontanet, head of the unit of epistemology of emerging diseases at the Pasteur Institute, had at the time tempered: “anthrax and smallpox are not really comparable. If the virus were to emerge in the Arctic, it would take an exceptional combination of circumstances for it to infect a human. “Indeed, smallpox cannot infect an animal.” In addition, very large quantities of vaccine remain. kept by the WHO which will be sufficient to protect the populations. The smallpox vaccine is effective in just one dose. “
A release of methane 30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide
Meanwhile, experts estimate that Russia is warming on average 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world. And if the thaw of the Siberian soil represents a high risk of resurgence of deadly diseases, it is not the only risk: when permafrost melts, it releases large amounts of an extremely harmful greenhouse gas, methane. The latter is 30 times more aggressive than carbon dioxide. Its action on the climate could be irremediable.
Also read:
- Covid-19: an immune signature for diabetic patients
- Symptoms of the coronavirus: Covid-19, cold or flu, how to distinguish them?
