I – The zombie who has been frozen for nearly 50,000 years has just resurfaced… again!

A very disturbing discovery has been made by scientists (again) as a zombie virus has been discovered lying dormant for 50,000 years.

Ancient viruses are particularly dangerous and potentially deadly, as scientists do not know what they can do to humans and animals.

Talking to CNN“There’s a lot going on with permafrost that’s concerning, and it really illustrates why being able to slow the melting is so important,” said Kimberly Miner, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

To better understand the risks of exposure to frozen viruses, scientists have revived some of them to test what they might cause.

Jean-Michel Claverie, emeritus professor of medicine and genomics at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University, hopes to discover whether these so-called “zombie viruses” are still contagious.

The oldest strain of the virus sampled is about 48,500 years old and was extracted from 16 metres underground.

The youngest specimen was 27,000 years old and was found in the stomach contents and fur of a mammoth.

The strains have been found to survive and remain highly infectious if exposed to another organism.

“We look at these amoeba viruses as surrogates for all the other potential viruses that might be present in the permafrost,” Claverie told CNN. “We see traces of many, many, many other viruses. But we don’t know for sure that they’re all still alive. But our logic is that if the amoeba viruses are still alive, there’s no reason why other viruses shouldn’t be alive and able to infect their hosts.”

For the record, a “zombie coal” outbreak killed more than 2,000 reindeer and sent 13 people to the hospital in remote, frozen Siberia a few years ago due to a virus that had been hiding under the ice.