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Tag Archives: zombie
What Cordyceps, The ‘Zombie’ Fungus On ‘The Last Of Us,’ Is Like IRL
If we’re to believe HBO’s zombie apocalypse series The Last of Us, the end of humankind comes via the tentacles of a creepy-looking, brain-infecting fungus called cordyceps.
As with so many terrifying scenarios, the germ-gone-wild depicted in the hit show has roots in the real world.
Cordyceps fungi are real organisms that are most at home in warm, humid climes. They take over the minds of ants as well as certain spiders, moths, locusts, and other arthropods, but thankfully, not humans.
“The fungus attacks insects that live in the ground or soil,” said Rebeca Rosengaus, an associate professor and behavioral ecologist at Northeastern University. “Ants are one but there are also grasshoppers, spiders, locusts.”
Cordyceps’ official name is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, and yes, scientists call it the “zombie-ant fungus.” It doesn’t spell the end of humankind, but it certainly does spell a grisly end for the creatures it infects.
Here’s how it works: The ant (or other arthropod) ambles innocently out of its nest, looking for food and blissfully unaware that cordyceps spores are raining down from a nearby tree or stem or branch.
The spores latch onto the ant (or other creature), releasing digestive enzymes to break down the insect’s cuticle (hard outer shell). Threadlike growths, known as mycelia, start growing inward and eventually take over the insect’s brain, which start producing neurotransmitters that affect brain function. The transformation is complete: The ant begins to stumble and convulse, acting in a way that benefits cordyceps.
“The fungus basically hijacks the brain so the ants stop doing what ants do and start doing what the fungus wants it to do, which is climb up the tree trunk,” Rosengaus said. Once they’ve reached the treetops, the ants bite the stem or leaf in what’s known as a death grip.
“That’s the last thing they do before the fungus starts growing from the neck or the head of the ant up,” Rosengaus said.
The ants die within six hours of infection, and then two to three days later, a fungal stalk emerges from the neck. Then, the spores start raining down again and the cycle repeats.
That’s life, at least for arthropods.
“Like many organisms on the planet, it does what it needs to do to replicate and continue reproducing,” said Dr. Scott Roberts, associate medical director of infection prevention at the Yale School of Medicine.
Could this ever happen in humans?
The Last of Us is real life for ants but not for humans — at least not yet, Rosengaus said, although she wouldn’t rule it out way down the line. “The fact that we don’t have a pathogen that has been able to come up with this strategy to hijack our minds does not mean that it’s not a possibility at some point.”
For now, though, this isn’t likely to happen in humans. “One of the reasons for that is that humans are warm-blooded,” Roberts said. “Most fungi and molds do not grow well in high-temperature environments.” Humans, which have a body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, are most definitely inhospitable.
“The creators of the show have taken a very niche moment in nature and fictionalized it,” Roberts added. “It’s a popular, great TV show, but it’s not really a viable or realistic portrayal of what could happen.”
“I don’t think we ought to be worried,” William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University, said. “A fungus is a much higher order, a much more complicated germ than a virus, so it would be a much more complicated phenomenon for this fungus to jump species.”
Real-life dangers
Which is not to say that humans can’t be infected by organisms that typically infect other species.
“We do have zoonotic infections,” Roberts said. Mpox is a good example. So is COVID-19, which comes from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “Often viruses and sometimes even fungi can be in another species and jump to other humans, but it usually needs progressive jumping back and forth [between humans and animals].”
Climate change is also introducing new dangers, including new fungi. One is a type of yeast called Candida auris.
The organism’s adaptation to warmer temperatures is thought to be the reason it now has a better chance of being able to survive in the human body. (This is also the reason The Last of Us writers use to explain why cordyceps can infect people.)
While Candida auris gravitates to your skin, it can cause bloodstream infections and is often spread in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
“If you’re healthy, it will stay on your skin and [even] go away, but if you have lines and catheters and have had surgeries, it can cause infections in wounds,” Roberts said. Those infections can spread not just to the bloodstream but also different organs, like the brain and heart.
“It’s a type of the candida species that has emerged with climate change,” Roberts said. “It is possible that other fungi and mold will evolve to survive and reproduce in warmer climates.”
Candida auris, which was first recognized only about 10 years ago, is already resistant to multiple drugs. It also spreads from person to person, unlike other types of molds or fungi that more often come from the environment, Roberts said.
As with most fungi, if you’re healthy, Candida auris isn’t likely to cause any harm. If you’re immunocompromised or otherwise in frail health, though, they can cause severe infections and that can even be potentially life-threatening.
Separating fact from fiction
There’s another entity hijacking our brains right now: science fiction–esque misinformation masquerading as fact.
As long as you realize The Last of Us and other shows are fiction, there’s no harm done.
“For decades, science fiction writers have taken basic ideas to an extreme. That’s part of the fun,” Schaffner said. “As wonderfully rich and extraordinary as real science is, there are real biological limitations, and this would be one of them. When it comes to real life, listen to public health. We’ll tie you to reality.”
It’s not like we need to look for things to worry about. “If you asked me whether this fungus or SARS-CoV-2 will be the end of us, one hundred times out of one hundred I’ll say SARS,” Roberts said.
Last of Us Zombie Kiss: Showrunner Discusses Character’s Death
After only two weeks, it should be pretty clear that HBO’s The Last of Us is catching on with audiences. From its spot-on adaptation of elements of the video game, to its dark extensions of that lore, to the terrifying reality of its world, fans and non-fans of the game alike seem to be eating it up. And, in the latest episode, there seemed to be less eating and more… kissing, which some may have found curious.
As discussed in our extended recap, episode two of The Last of Us ended with Tess (Anna Torv) sacrificing herself to save Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). She kind of had to, as she’s been bitten and is certain to turn into a mindless killer soon enough. But as the infected storm her location, and one of them notices her, instead of running at her in a fit of rage, he approaches slowly and gives her an open-mouth zombie kiss, with his living, squirming tendrils moving into her mouth.
It’s a moment that’s curious for a few reasons. One, it’s not in the game, so a decision was made to specifically do this. Two, we’re used to infected being incredibly violent with their victims, and this one is quite the opposite. And three, if Tess was already infected, was there any real point to it?
That third point can’t really be answered (maybe the kiss sped up the transformation or was just cool-looking), but the first two can and, in a new interview, co-showrunner Neil Druckmann talks about it. “These things don’t have to get violent unless you’re fighting them from spreading [the infection] further,” Druckmann said to Entertainment Weekly. “That is realized in this beautiful, yet horrific way with Anna.”
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So, because she’s made peace with becoming a zombie, she’s kind of brought into the mix in a non-violent way. Sure, we can buy that. But what about the tendrils themselves, which are also a new addition?
“Craig [Mazin] smartly said, ‘What can we do to separate our infected even further from zombies?’ It’s more than just a bite. There’s something else going on,” Druckmann added. “I wish we had that aha moment immediately, but we brainstormed so many different things that they could be doing. Some of them were pretty outlandish.”
And, if you thought this act of violence/romance was something, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Check out the moment in the latest episode of The Last of Us.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
The Last of Us episode 2: Tess’s death and the zombie kiss, explained
Toward the end of the second episode of “The Last of Us,” it is revealed that Tess, Joel’s partner in crime, has been infected. To make matters worse, a horde of zombies is en route to the trio’s location. As Joel and Ellie, the series’s protagonists, make a break for it, Tess stays behind to slow the zombies down by upturning a few barrels of gasoline and setting off a stash of grenades left behind by a group of smugglers and freedom fighters. But before she can spring her trap, she’s approached by a still-human-looking zombie, who kisses her on the mouth — with jellyfish-like tendrils reaching out of his mouth and squirming into hers.
My first reaction was disgust. My second: Why on earth did the show’s creators do that?
The sequence plays out differently in the show than it does in the game, where Tess is killed by agents of FEDRA, the authoritarian pseudo-government propped up in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Here’s how showrunner Craig Mazin explained the change to Elise Favis, my former colleague, who recently interviewed him for The Washington Post.
“So I would ask Neil [Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us”] a thousand annoying questions, especially early on,” Mazin said. “And I remember one of the annoying questions I asked was, why are FEDRA soldiers all the way out here? If the open city is really, really dangerous, it seems like they’re really going way, way out of their way to find Tess and Joel. They might say, ‘hey, they did a terrible thing, but they’re just gonna get killed out there. So what do we care? We’re certainly not gonna let them back in. If we ever see their faces again, we’ll get them.’ And [Druckmann] was like, ‘Okay, that’s fair.’”
The creative team opted, instead, to use the episode as an opportunity to lay out some ground rules — for Ellie and the viewers alike.
“One of the needs we had was to show how the infected take over a city,” Mazin said. “How do they work? How do they infect? How many of them are out there? What kinds [are there]? And that naturally led to what made sense for that ending, which was for it to be infected rather than FEDRA soldiers. But you’ll see FEDRA soldiers again, just not in Boston.”
That might explain why zombies kill Tess instead of FEDRA, but beyond just the utility the showrunners, it’s worth considering what the updated scene does symbolically, and what the change means in the context of the story. What does a kiss mean? We can free associate here. Kisses can be romantic. They can symbolize love. They can be nonconsensual. There’s the kiss of Judas, the kiss of death, “Kiss from a Rose.” Remember “Cat Person?” Kisses can be tender, wet, bad, sloppy, bored. There are bisous, a playful French greeting that involves light kisses on the cheeks. Throughout history, kisses have meant a lot of things. So what does the zombie kiss mean here?
There are a few interpretations that I think a person can arrive at in reasonably good faith. It’s possible the showrunners of this horror drama TV show wanted a dramatic and horrifying body horror gross-out scene. But scratching the surface a bit, both the kiss and its tendrils give the sense that Tess is being welcomed into a new “community” of infected. There’s something reminiscent of Judas’s kiss in it too; it might signal that if Tess fails to detonate the explosives around her, she’ll eventually grow into a monster and go on to infect other people — going from someone attempting to save humanity by smuggling Ellie, into someone who will betray it.
Another possible meaning is relevant to Tess’s relationship with Joel. Before dying, Tess tells Joel she never asked him to feel the way she felt (meaning: to reciprocate her love). The zombie kiss is a grotesque inversion of what Tess seemed to want very badly from Joel: intimacy, closeness, oneness. But this closeness comes at a cost: a loss of both her identity and humanity.
There’s a last interpretation, one that’s less charitable. The kiss is clearly nonconsensual, a grim fictionalization of rape culture and the kind of brutish behavior so many people suffer even in our current non-apocalypse. (You can read this as thoughtful critique or thoughtless reproduction.) And perhaps the showrunners, who are men, did not think about whether it might be cruel or send a weird message to subject one of the show’s most prominent female characters (so far) to an even worse fate than she suffered in the game, and in a more lurid way at that.
These different interpretations can, of course, overlap. Meaning is messy, and you can choose to believe several of these at once. I would also caution that there probably isn’t a right interpretation, even if Mazin and Druckmann might have a preferred one. A good way of thinking about these readings is as stops on a metro line. You have your destination, other people have theirs, and at any given point, you can get right back on the line and go someplace else. And if, for example, later in the season, Mazin and Druckmann opt to kill other female characters with abandon and in similarly grotesque ways, you may hitch a ride from one interpretation to another.
Trying to parse the meaning of the kiss raises the question of how you watch TV. In the case of “The Last of Us,” I think there are roughly two types of viewers. There are those who buy into the fiction of the show and interpret the stuff that happens on screen very plainly, as a story. Then there are those who watch the show and see it as the product of hundreds of people’s work, and view the proceedings as borne of creators’ choices. It’s the difference between saying “I can’t believe Joel did X” and “Why did Mazin and Druckmann create an episode where Joel did X?”
Because The Last of Us franchise has existed for nearly 10 years, a lot of people are instinctively in the latter camp, having seen Druckmann in particular elevated from random game director to minor celebrity within video game culture. And my first reaction (ick!) leaned that way too. Why, I wondered, did these two creators opt for what seemed to be just a more disgusting televised death for Tess? Having spent some more time with the scene while working on my recap of the episode — and trying to think about it on its own terms — I think the way the show plays the scene is the second interpretation, the one that centers on Joel and Tess’s relationship. The whole episode is about their dynamic, and how Tess and Joel differ in their relation to Ellie.
With that spin, the scene reads as more than just a gross-out. And yet, I can’t help but feel disappointed. The search for a deeper meaning was fun as far as spending a few hours goes, but the seemingly correct interpretation isn’t that revelatory or interesting, which is why at first blush it feels like just a grisly, vaguely sexualized death of a major female character.
We already knew that Tess wanted more from Joel than she got. We already get the horrors of this apocalypse. But beyond that, for all its glances and gruffness, the show is light on meaningful characterization. Which is what makes settling on an interpretation so difficult — and reading the scene as grossness for its own sake so easy.
Wagner’s Desensitized Prison Fighters Keep Staggering into Bakhmut Like This Is a Zombie Apocalypse
BAKHMUT, Ukraine—In the smoke-filled basement of a nondescript building in the city center of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, the men of the SKALA intelligence battalion are getting ready for a risky reconnaissance mission. One of them is burning a last cigarette in the dimly-lit hallway. Clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a bearded soldier wraps yellow tape around both his arms—a sign used by Ukrainian soldiers to identify each other on the battlefield. “Be careful out there, there are snipers in this area,” a portly officer warns him, rising from his office chair facing a flatscreen TV that intermittently broadcasts the live-feed of a drone flying over carnage in the city. “I can’t die, my mom won’t let me,” quips the soldier with a weary smile, checking his gear one last time before heading out.
The previously-muffled sound of outgoing artillery becomes sharper and louder as the door to the street swings open. They take off.
“The situation is pretty tense, but we’re controlling it,” says 23-year-old Alexander, clutching his American-made M4 assault rifle. “We’re holding.” With his buzzcut and boyish looks, the young man wouldn’t look out of place in a trendy nightclub in downtown Kyiv. Yet, for weeks, Alexander and the grizzled soldiers of the SKALA battalion have been weathering the storm of daily Russian assaults and shelling on Bakhmut, hunkering down in the basement and doing daily sorties in the gray zone—the stretch of land between Ukrainian and Russian positions. Named after its founder and leader Iurii Skala, the SKALA battalion is tasked with conducting air and ground reconnaissance, as well as “cleaning operations”—a euphemism meaning assaulting enemy positions and taking out the Russian soldiers manning them.
“The drones are our eyes, out there,” says Alexander. Out there is Bakhmut—a salt-mining town of 70,000 inhabitants known for its sparkling white wine—that has been devastated by months of relentless Russian shelling, and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons with the Battle of the Somme or Passchendaele. The town is a major transport hub and sits on a strategic highway that runs through Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet, some—including one of Ukraine’s top generals—have argued that the town’s strategic value is dubious at best. However, it is one of the few frontline areas where the Russians are still on the advance, and the success-starved Russian high command is desperate to claim a victory, at any cost. Some have theorized that the capture of Bakhmut would constitute a personal prize for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the infamous Wagner paramilitary group, whose mercenaries make up most of the Russian forces in the area. The U.S. believes Prigozhin has a financial motive: Wagner has often seized lucrative gold and diamond mines in areas where it operates in Africa, and Prigozhin may have set his sights on the salt and gypsum mines around Bakhmut.
According to Rem, a former car dealer from Dnipro now correcting artillery fire with the help of his drone, most of the soldiers sent in suicidal assaults on Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut are “zeks,” or convicts, recruited by Wagner to bolster the number of Russian forces in Ukraine. “Mobiks [conscripts] are usually scared, and they scatter when they get shelled. Those guys are not scared,” he said.
Of the Wagnerites, Rem says that they’re a much more effective fighting force than they’re usually given credit for: “They’re making progress, after all.” Desensitized to violence and with nothing left to lose, the prisoners—many of whom are violent criminals including murderers and rapists—are considered by Ukrainian soldiers a tougher enemy than the average army conscript.
A Ukrainian service member stands outside his outpost in Bakhmut during a drone reconnaissance operation on December 01, 2022.
Justin Yau
The Russian tactic of sending prison recruits to attack Ukrainian positions—allowing them to identify defenses for the artillery to pummel afterwards—has proven effective, though slow and deadly. While no major breakthrough has occurred, they have been slowly eroding Ukrainian defenses, and creeping every closer to the eastern outskirts of the city.
This assessment was echoed in late December by Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former national security adviser for Ukraine currently working on military planning, who said of the prison conscripts: “They are—I cannot say fearless—but they have nothing to lose pretty much. So, they are attacking constantly and they’ve been killed in big quantities as well.”
Yet those incremental gains on the eastern approach to the city have come at a cost for Russian forces, as evidenced during Prigozhin’s well-publicized visit to the frontline over the New Year. In a series of videos released by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the Wagner boss first visits a basement filled with the bodies of his fighters, many of them convicts, killed during the battle for Bakhmut, before complaining that “every house [in Bakhmut] has become a fortress”—and that it sometimes takes a week of fighting to take a single house.
According to a U.S. official quoted by The Guardian on Thursday, out of an initial force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries, Wagner has sustained more than 4,100 killed in action and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut.
Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the city in late December underscored the symbolic value of “fortress Bakhmut”—and the sacrifices made to defend it. A Ukrainian officer serving in the East, who asked to remain anonymous, ventured an estimate of a dozen casualties a day.
Outside SKALA’s command center, the streets are almost empty, save for a couple of civilians hurrying along, carrying grocery bags or pulling carts filled with empty water bottles. The thundering sound of shelling echoes through empty avenues and deserted public squares, bouncing off the facades of destroyed residential buildings and closed-down shops. Here and there, the rocket of a GRAD multiple rocket launcher can be spotted planted upright in the asphalt.
A couple of blocks away from SKALA’s headquarters, sixty-something Hrihorii is busy cutting firewood on the car park of his residential building, seemingly oblivious to the outgoing artillery fire booming in the distance. Clothed in warm winter clothing and black plastic boots, the man says he has no intention to leave his apartment – despite the windows having been shattered the day prior to our visit. “I am waiting for the Ukrainian army to win,” he says with a smile. “I am not leaving.” Next to him, food is simmering in a pot placed over an open fire. The crater from last morning’s shelling is located a mere feet away from his improvised kitchen. Had he been cooking at the time of its landing, Hrihorii would have died.
Back at the command post, a group of a dozen soldiers are returning from a mission in the “gray zone.” The soldiers, drenched in sweat and amped up on adrenaline, hurry through the door, cursing loudly. Roman, a soldier from Dnipro, lights up a cigarette and introduces the other members of his crew, in broken English : Vansi, a heavyweight soldier who had served in Donbas in 2015, and “Bakhmut,” who now serves in the charred ruins of his hometown after sending the rest of his family to safety in Bulgaria. “I haven’t run like this in twenty years,” exclaims Roman, panting. According to him, 50 year-old Russian T-62 tanks were operating in the area. “We couldn’t see them, but we could hear them,” he says. The use of such obsolete models points to the growing deficit of equipment and vehicles among Russian forces, a problem compounded by the sanctions that have targeted the country’s military industry. Yet Ukrainian soldiers say the Russians shouldn’t be underestimated. “It’s still very loud out there, the fight is not over,” says Roman, putting out his cigarette.
Roman (left) and “Bakhmut” (right) are among the Ukrainian fighters frustrating Russia’s efforts to take Bakhmut.
Justin Yau
Could a zombie virus frozen in mammoth remains leak from a Russian lab and spark a new pandemic?
The majestic creature had lain silently in the permafrost for more than a million years. But all it took was a curious scientist, tinkering with its long-dead body, to unleash a terrible new pandemic on the world.
No, it’s not the plot of a woolly mammoth sequel to Jurassic Park, nor another theory on the origins of Covid-19 — though the result of this scientific investigation could be horribly similar.
It’s the story of how, right now, Russian researchers are unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an attempt to ‘reawaken’ Stone Age viruses.
Such viruses are thought to have remained dormant for millennia in the frozen remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species in northeast Siberia.
Russian researchers are unearthing the bodies of long-dead mammals in an attempt to ‘reawaken’ Stone Age viruses
Like the virus that caused Covid-19, these prehistoric ‘paleoviruses’ are unfamiliar to the human body and, were they ever to find their way across the species barrier, catastrophe could follow. We would, after all, have no natural defence.
The woolly mammoths that roamed the Siberian steppes — until the last one died some 10,000 years ago — were fearsome creatures. The size of an elephant, they had sharp tusks that could spear a human unwise enough to get near.
For biologists, they seem to hold an enduring fascination. Last year, a project called Colossal was launched, aiming to tweak the genetic code of the mammoth’s closest living relative, the Asian elephant, to create a hybrid animal that could survive in the Arctic Circle.
This latest project — carried out by Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology, known as Vector — aims to extract cellular material containing the viruses that killed these frozen beasts, and take it back to the lab for experimentation.
What could possibly go wrong? To conjure up the all-too-real nightmare scenario, you only have to hear the history of Vector.
The idea of Russian scientists meddling with long-dormant mammal-infecting viruses has caused alarm among international experts
One of the research centre’s branches is a former biological weapons facility which, in April 1979, during the Soviet era, accidentally released spores of deadly anthrax bacteria. The resulting anthrax outbreak killed at least 66 people, though Soviet authorities denied for years that the incident had happened.
Today, Vector hosts one of the 59 maximum security biolabs around the world (another is China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, widely suspected of inadvertently unleashing Covid-19).
Vector’s track record of lethal mishaps also includes an incident in 2004 when a researcher died after pricking herself accidentally with a needle carrying the Ebola virus.
The idea of Russian scientists meddling with long-dormant mammal-infecting viruses has caused alarm among international experts such as Jean-Michel Claverie, a professor of microbiology at the University of Aix-Marseille in France.
Last month, Claverie revealed that his team had itself revived a Siberian ‘zombie’ virus. This had lain frozen under a lake bed for almost 50,000 years.
But in Claverie’s case — for safety’s sake, he insists — his work is focused solely on viruses that can infect only single-celled amoeba, rather than threatening animals or, indeed, humans.
‘[Vector’s research] is terrible. I’m totally against it,’ he says. ‘[It] is very, very risky. Our immune systems have never encountered these type of viruses. Some of them could be 200,000 or even 400,000 years old. But ancient viruses that infected animals or humans could still be infectious.’
Vector, State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology outside of Novosibirsk
As for trusting Vector’s biosecurity, Claverie says: ‘I would not be very confident that everything is up to date.’
Even if the Russians could be trusted not to let loose a virus, we have other reasons to fear that something nasty will come for us from the Arctic’s frozen wastes.
This is because the permafrost — vast swathes of permanently frozen ground — is no longer permanent. Thanks to global warming it is melting, and from it may emerge deadly old infectious foes. And this really isn’t science fiction: it has happened already.
Eight years ago, Russia’s far north experienced abnormally mild summer temperatures.
Soon afterwards, 72 people from a community of nomadic reindeer herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised with infections.
The culprit was, again, anthrax. Though this time, not from a Russian bioweapons lab, but from human and animal remains buried in the thawing permafrost.
A 12-year-old boy died. ‘We literally fought for the life of each person, but the infection showed its cunning,’ said the governor of the affected Yamal area, Dmitry Kobylkin. Anthrax disease, which is known locally as Siberian plague, had not been seen in the region since 1941.
But average temperatures have increased by up to 1c in northern Russia over the past 15 years. And the warmer climate is now thawing the permafrost that covers much of the country, including cemeteries and animal burial grounds.
The floodwaters produced by the thawing permafrost also erode river banks where nomads bury their dead. It is from such cadavers that the zombie anthrax spores are awakening.
Anthrax spores can survive in frozen human and animal remains for hundreds of years, waiting to be released, according to Alexey Kokorin, head of the climate and energy programme for the World Wildlife Fund in Russia.
Viruses from these remains can then infect the groundwater that people drink. Indeed, the Siberian boy who died in 2014 had an intestinal form of the disease, which first causes fever, stomach pains, diarrhoea and vomiting.
What other deadly contagions might be lying in wait for us?
In 2005, Nasa revived bacteria that had been locked in Alaskan permafrost for more than 12,000 years. Other scientists have recovered genetic material from diseases such as smallpox, the 1918 Spanish flu and even the bubonic plague. In fact, human remains exhumed from frozen ground in Alaska in 1997 have yielded the complete genome of the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus that killed tens of millions.
Anthrax spores can survive in frozen human and animal remains for hundreds of years, waiting to be released, according to Alexey Kokorin
Two years ago, a workshop that convened global experts from organisations such as the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council warned that, ‘permafrost may harbour infectious viruses or bacteria that have been dormant for thousands or even millions of years, for which local populations lack immunity and no countermeasures exist’.
Some scientists hope these viruses and bacteria will not have been able to survive being frozen for many centuries because they originally evolved to thrive inside warm bodies.
However, this international workshop warned there remains a real danger of globally lethal pandemic outbreaks that are ‘low-probability, but high-consequence’.
Beyond global warming, the biggest risk of a ‘defrosted pandemic’ comes from open-cast mining.
In Siberia, the frozen ground is increasingly being exploited for fossil fuels, with open-cast coal mines frequently dug close to human settlements. This form of mining entails removing layers of permafrost that can be hundreds of thousands of years old.
Professor Claverie, the French microbiologist, says it may create another level of risk, as it is being done in the open rather than in a secure bio-lab. ‘You don’t know what is there,’ Claverie warns.
Scientists at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine held a special meeting in 2019 to explore the threat of lethal microbes emerging from our planet’s melting ice.
They concluded that the world needed increased disease surveillance in the Arctic to spot any outbreaks as quickly as possible, in order to be able to develop defences or cures in time to save millions.
Indeed, as Claverie’s team reports in a yet-to-be-published study, the biggest risk of all is from unknown viruses that may, just like Covid‑19, spread rapidly through a population that lacks natural immunity, triggering a pandemic.
Our best hope would be to develop vaccines in double-quick time. The lesson from Covid-19 is that we need international cooperation in order to decode the new threat’s genes and produce rapid counter-measures.
However, such cooperation between Western and Russian scientists has itself been largely put on ice — in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
If ever there were a bad time to be meddling with frozen Russian mammoths, it is surely now.
What is the ‘zombie virus’ found in Russia – and should we be worried?
The words “zombie virus discovered in Russian ice” sounds like something straight out of a horror film ― although after the pandemic, it’s pretty difficult to shock any of us.
But scientists this week published research that shows viruses frozen for tens of thousands of years in Siberian permafrost are being revived.
Researchers from France, Germany and Russia revived 13 new types of virus that had been on ice in Siberian soil for between 27,000 and 48,500 years.
They said their work posed negligible risk to people ― unlike that of other scientists looking for ancient viruses in frozen remains of mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses or prehistoric horses.
There’s a Pandora’s box – they have the potential to be human pathogens
Prof Birgitta Evengard, Department of Clinical Microbiology, Umea University, Sweden
But their results could, they wrote, “be extrapolated to many other DNA viruses capable of infecting humans or animals”.
“It is thus likely that ancient permafrost … will release these unknown viruses upon thawing,” they said in bioRxiv, an online research portal.
“How long these viruses could remain infectious once exposed to outdoor conditions and how likely they will be to encounter and infect a suitable host in the interval, is yet impossible to estimate.
“But the risk is bound to increase in the context of global warming, when permafrost thawing will keep accelerating, and more people will be populating the Arctic in the wake of industrial ventures.”
‘Back-from-the-dead’ viruses
The so-called zombie viruses are no threat to people, being types that infect only micro-organisms, but other pathogens released in future as permafrost melts could, scientists say, pose risks to humans.
Reports from Greenpeace, the environmental organisation, have even asked if such “back-from-the-dead” pathogens could lead to a new pandemic.
The findings are an echo of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, in which scientists cloned dinosaurs using DNA taken from insects preserved in amber ― only for the creatures to wreak havoc on humankind.
Permafrost, or permanently frozen soil, is mostly found in Alaska, Canada and Siberia, and covers about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, but areas are thawing as the climate warms.
Numerous other research groups are looking at pathogens, including bacteria, and larger organisms being released as a result.
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How the climate crisis is changing our world – in pictures
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Viruses dating back 15,000 years have been discovered in an ice cap in Tibet, research published last year revealed.
Even more extraordinarily, 2018 reports indicated that tiny nematode worms had been brought back to life from Siberian soil samples frozen for up to 42,000 years.
The researchers behind that study were confident that the creatures, which began to move and eat after being kept at 20°C in Petri dishes containing a nutrient medium, were not there because of contamination of samples.
Among those interested in the disease threats from permafrost micro-organisms is Prof Birgitta Evengard, of the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Umea University in Sweden.
Prof Evengard helped to organise a 2019 conference, Understanding and Responding to Global Health Security Risks from Microbial Threats in the Arctic.
Pandora’s box
She said it was not possible to say that some pathogens found in thawing permafrost would definitely pose a threat to people, but there was a chance that they would.
“There’s a Pandora’s box ― they have the potential to be human pathogens,” she said, adding that there would be spillover into the environment.
“In Siberia you have three rivers bringing out debris from permafrost into the Bering Sea, ocean currents that are quite busy.
“They will take it around the world in a couple of weeks. People don’t realise that. The world is very, very connected by all ecosystems ― the oceans, terrestrial and the air.”
The risks are increased because research released a few months ago revealed that the Arctic has, since 1979, warmed nearly four times faster than the globe as a whole, a finding that Prof Evengard described as alarming.
“This means what’s happening in the Arctic is the driver for what’s going to happen in the rest of the world,” she said.
It was important, she added, for scientists to have access to regions such as Siberia so that they could analyse what was happening.
Aside from potentially releasing pathogens into the environment and causing areas of land to collapse, the permafrost thawing risks accelerating climate change.
As ground thaws these microbes cause the release of carbon dioxide and methane, both greenhouse gases, because they consume organic matter in the soil.
Updated: December 06, 2022, 4:04 AM
Anti-Aging Medicines Seek To Eliminate “Zombie” Cells – But Could This Be Dangerous?
Senescent cells are distinct in that they eventually stop multiplying but do not die off as expected.
Senescent Cells Help To Heal Damaged Tissues
According to a recent study from the University of California, San Francisco, not all senescent cells are detrimental “zombies” that need to be eliminated to avoid age-related diseases. Instead, some of them are embedded in young, healthy tissues and promote normal recovery from damage.
Scientists have now seen these cells in action in lung tissue as well as other organs that serve as barriers in the body, such as the small intestine, colon, and skin. When they employed drugs known as senolytics to eliminate these cells, lung tissue damage healed more slowly.
“Senescent cells can occupy niches with privileged positions as ‘sentinels’ that monitor tissue for injury and respond by stimulating nearby stem cells to grow and initiate repair,” said Tien Peng, MD, associate professor of pulmonary, critical care, allergy and sleep medicine, and senior author of the study, which was recently published in the journal Science.
Aging Cells Can Both Damage and Heal
It’s understandable, according to Peng, that scientists initially saw senescent cells as purely harmful. Senescent cells, which have the characteristics of old, worn-out cells and the inability to make new cells, accumulate as humans age. Instead of dying, they live on, spewing a mix of inflammatory substances that form the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). These variables have been linked to
But killing off senescent cells has dangers, Peng said. For one thing, this current study showed that senescent cells also possess the ability to promote normal healing through the activation of stem cell repair. “Our study suggests that senolytics could adversely affect normal repair, but they also have the potential to target diseases where senescent cells drive pathologic stem cell behavior,” said Peng.
Lighting Up Senescent Cells
One major challenge to studying senescent cells is that biomarkers of senescence (such as the gene p16) are often quite sparse, making it difficult to detect the cells. In early experiments, researchers extracted cells called fibroblasts into culture dishes, allowing them to grow and produce enough cells to experiment with, and then stressed the cells with chemicals that induced them to become senescent. But in living organisms, cells interact with tissues around them, strongly affecting the cells’ gene activity. This means that the characteristics of cells growing isolated in a glass dish could be quite different from that of cells in their natural environment.
To create a more powerful tool for their studies, postdoctoral scholar Nabora Reyes de Barboza, Ph.D. and colleagues improved on a common technique of fusing a relevant gene—in this case, the p16 gene, which is overly active in senescent cells—with green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a marker that can reveal the location of the cells under ultraviolet light. By enhancing the quantity and stability of green fluorescent protein in these senescent cells, Reyes greatly amplified the fluorescent signal, finally enabling the researchers to see senescent cells in their natural habitat of living tissues.
“Zombies” Stimulate Stem Cells Shortly After Birth
Using this highly sensitive tool, the researchers found that senescent cells exist in young and healthy tissues to a greater extent than previously thought, and actually begin appearing shortly after birth. The scientists also identified specific growth factors that senescent cells secrete to stimulate stem cells to grow and repair tissues. Relevant to aging and tissue injury is the discovery that cells of the immune system such as macrophages and monocytes can activate senescent cells, suggesting that inflammation seen in aged or damaged tissue is a critical modifier of senescent cell activity and regeneration.
In their studies of lung tissue, Peng’s team observed green glowing senescent cells lying next to stem cells on the basement membrane that serves as a barrier preventing foreign cells and harmful chemicals from entering the body and also allows oxygen to diffuse from the air in the lungs into underlying tissues. Damage can occur at this dynamic interface. The team saw senescent cells in similar positions in other barrier organs such as the small intestine, colon, and skin, and their experiments confirmed that if senescent cells were killed with senolytics, lung stem cells were not able to properly repair the barrier surface.
Leanne Jones, Ph.D., director of the UCSF Bakar Aging Research Institute and Stuart Lindsay Endowed Professor in Experimental Pathology, said Peng’s study is truly significant for the field of aging research, where the goal is to help individuals live longer and more healthy lives.
“The studies suggest that senolytics research should focus on recognizing and precisely targeting harmful senescent cells, perhaps at the earliest signs of disease, while leaving helpful ones intact,” she said. “These findings emphasize the need to develop better drugs and small molecules that will target specific subsets of senescent cells that are implicated in disease rather than in regeneration.”
Reference: “Sentinel p16INK4a+ cells in the basement membrane form a reparative niche in the lung” by Nabora S. Reyes, Maria Krasilnikov, Nancy C. Allen, Jin Young Lee, Ben Hyams, Minqi Zhou, Supriya Ravishankar, Monica Cassandras, Chaoqun Wang, Imran Khan, Peri Matatia, Yoshikazu Johmura, Ari Molofsky, Michael Matthay, Makoto Nakanishi, Dean Sheppard, Judith Campisi and Tien Peng, 13 October 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abf3326
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
‘Zombie’ viruses are thawing from melting permafrost in Russia
The same team of French, Russian and German researchers previously isolated ancient viruses from the permafrost and published their findings in 2015. This concentration of fresh viruses suggests that such pathogens are probably more common in the tundra than previously believed, they suggest in a preprint study they published last month on the BioRxiv website, a portal where many scientists circulate their research before it is accepted in a scientific journal.
“Every time we look, we will find a virus,” said Jean-Michel Claverie, a co-author of the study and an emeritus professor of virology at Aix-Marseille Université in France, in a phone interview. “It’s a done deal. We know that every time we’re going to look for viruses, infectious viruses in permafrost, we are going to find some.”
Although the ones they studied were infectious only to amoebas, the researchers said that there was a risk that other viruses trapped in the permafrost for millennia could spread to humans and other animals.
Virologists who were not involved in the research said the specter of future pandemics being unleashed from the Siberian steppe ranks low on the list of current public health threats. Most new — or ancient — viruses are not dangerous, and the ones that survive the deep freeze for thousands of years tend not to be in the category of coronaviruses and other highly infectious viruses that lead to pandemics, they said.
The European team’s findings have not yet been peer-reviewed. But independent virologists said that their findings seemed plausible, and relied on the same techniques that have produced other, vetted results.
The risks from viruses pent up in the Arctic are worth monitoring, several scientists said. Smallpox, for example, has a genetic structure that can hold up under long-term freezing, and if people stumble upon the defrosted corpses of smallpox victims, there is a chance they could be infected anew. Other categories of virus — such as the coronaviruses that cause covid-19 — are more fragile and less likely to survive the deep freeze.
“In nature we have a big natural freezer, which is the Siberian permafrost,” said Paulo Verardi, a virologist who is the head of the Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science at the University of Connecticut. “And that can be a little bit concerning,” especially if pathogens are frozen inside animals or people, he said.
But, he said, “if you do the risk assessment, this is very low,” he added. “We have many more things to worry about right now.”
For the most recent research, the European team took samples from several sites in Siberia over a series of years starting in 2015. The viruses they found — of an unusually large type that infects amoebas — were last active thousands, and in some cases, tens of thousands of years ago. Some of the samples were in soil or rivers, although one of the amoeba-targeting viruses was found in the frozen intestinal remains of a Siberian wolf from at least 27,000 years ago, the team said.
The researchers used amoebas as “virus bait,” they said, because they thought it would be a good way to search for viruses without propagating ones that could spread to animals or humans. But they said that didn’t mean these viruses didn’t exist in the frozen tundra.
Siberia is warming at one of the fastest rates on Earth, about four times the global average. For many recent summers it has been plagued by wildfires and temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And its permafrost — soil that is so thoroughly cold that it remains frozen even through the summer — is rapidly thawing. That means that organisms that have been locked away for thousands of years are now being exposed, as longer periods of defrosting at the soil surface enables objects that had been trapped below to rise upward.
Researchers say the chance of humans stumbling upon the carcasses of humans or animals is increasing, especially in Russia, whose far-north reaches are more densely settled than Arctic regions in other countries. The team gathered some of their samples in Yakutsk, a regional capital and one of Russia’s fastest-growing cities due to a mining boom.
The warming permafrost has been blamed for outbreaks of infectious disease before. A 2016 outbreak of anthrax hit a remote Siberian village and was linked to a 75-year-old reindeer carcass that had emerged from the frozen ground. But anthrax, which is not a virus, isn’t unique to Siberia and is unlikely to cause widespread pandemics.
Many virologists say they are more worried by viruses that are currently circulating among humans than the risk of unusual ones from the permafrost.
New microbes emerge or reemerge all the time, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post in 2015, when the permafrost researchers’ first findings came out.
“This is a fact of our planet and our existence,” he said. “The finding of new viruses in permafrost is not much different from all of this. Its relevance will be dependent on a sequence of unlikely events: The permafrost virus must be able to infect humans, it must then [cause disease], and it must be able to spread efficiently from human to human. This can happen, but it is very unlikely.”
More problematic, many virologists say, are modern-day viruses that infect people and lead to diseases that are sometimes hard to control, such as Ebola, cholera, Dengue and even the ordinary flu. Viruses that cause disease in humans are unlikely to survive the repeated defrosting and freezing cycle that happens at the surface level of the permafrost. And the spread in mosquitoes and ticks that has been linked to global warming is more likely to infect humans with pathogens, some experts say.
An extinct virus “seems like a low risk compared to the large numbers of viruses that are circulating among vertebrates around the world, and that have proven to be real threats in the past, and where similar events could happen in the future, as we still lack a framework for recognizing those ahead of time,” said Colin Parrish, a virologist at Cornell University who is also the president of the American Society for Virology.
Francis reported from London.
48,500-year-old zombie virus revived by scientists in Russia : The Tribune India
ANI
Moscow, November 30
French scientists have revived a 48,500-year-old “zombie virus” buried under a frozen lake in Russia.
According to New York Post, the French scientists have sparked fears of yet another pandemic after the revival of the zombie virus.
The New York Post has quoted a viral study which is yet to be peer-reviewed. “The situation would be much more disastrous in the case of plant, animal, or human diseases caused by the revival of an ancient unknown virus,” reads the study.
According to the preliminary report, global warming is irrevocably thawing enormous swathes of permafrost — permanently frozen ground that covers a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. This has had the unsettling effect of “releasing organic materials frozen for up to a million years” – possibly deadly germs included.
“Part of this organic matter also consists of revived cellular microbes (prokaryotes, unicellular eukaryotes) as well as viruses that remained dormant since prehistorical times,” the researchers write.
According to the New York Post, scientists have, perhaps strangely, revived some of these so-called “zombie viruses” from the Siberian permafrost in order to investigate the awakening critters.
The oldest, Pandoravirus yedoma, was 48,500-year-old, a record age for a frozen virus returning to a form where it may infect other creatures. This breaks the previous record of a 30,000-year-old virus identified in Siberia by the same scientists in 2013.
The new strain is one of 13 viruses described in the study, each with its own genome, according to Science Alert.
While the Pandoravirus was discovered at the bottom of a lake in Yukechi Alas, Yakutia, Russia, others have been discovered everywhere from mammoth fur to Siberian wolf intestines.
Scientists discovered that all of the “zombie viruses” have the potential to be infectious and hence pose a “health danger” after researching the live cultures. They believe that coivd-style pandemics will become more common in the future as melting permafrost releases long-dormant viruses like a microbial Captain America, as per New York Post.
“It is therefore legitimate to ponder the risk of ancient viral particles remaining infectious and getting back into circulation by the thawing of ancient permafrost layers,” they write.
Unfortunately, it’s a vicious cycle as organic matter released by the thawing ice decomposes into carbon dioxide and methane, further enhancing the greenhouse effect and accelerating the melt.
New York Post reports that the newly-thawed virus might only be the tip of the epidemiological iceberg as there are likely more hibernating viruses yet to be discovered.
More research is needed to assess the level of infectiousness of these unknown viruses when exposed to light, heat, oxygen, and other outside environmental variables.
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