The effects of climate change are being witnessed in a variety of settings, from crop yield changes due to unreliable weather conditions to species extinction. According to new research, yet another effect could be the increased risk of “viral spillover” in some regions that could cause new pandemics in the coming years.
Climate change could shift the species range of certain vectors and viral reservoirs northward, and the High Arctic area could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics.
This result was extracted from a Investigation article titled ‘Viral spill risk increases with climate change in High Arctic lake sediments’, which was published Wednesday (Oct 19) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the journal of biological research of The Royal Society from United Kingdom.
What is viral spill?
Viruses are some of the most abundant entities on earth, but they need to infect a host cell in order to replicate. Based on the research, these virus/host relationships appear relatively stable within superkingdoms, the major groupings of organisms. However, below this range, viruses can infect a new host from a reservoir host (in which it normally resides) by being able to sustainably transmit into a new host, a process defined as ‘viral spillover’.
The study
To study the possibility of a viral spill, researchers from the University of Ottawa collected sediment and soil samples from Lake Hazen in Canada, the largest High Arctic lake by volume in the world and the largest freshwater ecosystem in the region. .
They then carried out DNA and RNA sequencing to reconstruct the composition of the virus from the lake area. They estimated the risk of spread and found that the chances of a virus moving to a new host increase with runoff from melting glaciers, which they treat as an indicator of climate change. As temperatures rise, so does glacial melt, and there is a greater chance that viruses and bacteria previously trapped in the ice will find new hosts.
The result
In this study, while the risk of viral spread was found to increase with changes in the environment in a particular place, driven by global warming, this alone does not guarantee an increased chance of a pandemic occurring through virus here. “Overall, we provide here a novel approach to assess contagion risk… This is not the same as predicting contagions or even pandemics,” the authors said.
This is because there is another important link in the process. As long as viruses and their ‘bridging vectors’, which act as hosts and lead to their spread, are not simultaneously present in the environment, the probability of dramatic events is likely to remain low. However, that alone does not mean relief. The authors said: “Climate change leads to shifts in species ranges and distributions, new associations may emerge, bringing vectors that may mediate viral contagions, as recently highlighted by simulations.”
Source: news.google.com