Future threat from the past
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REVIEW ARTICLE
Future threat from the past Amr El-Sayed 1 & Mohamed Kamel 1 Received: 29 June 2020 / Accepted: 12 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Global warming is one of the major challenges facing humanity. The increase in the Earth’s temperature and thawing of ancient ice release viable viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms which were trapped for thousands and millions of years. Such microorganisms may belong to novel microbial species, unknown genotypes of present pathogens, already eradicated pathogens, or even known pathogens that gained extremely robust characteristics due to their subjection to long-term stress. These worries drew more attention following the death of a child by ancient anthrax spores in Siberian in 2016 and the reconstruction of smallpox and Spanish flu genomes from ancient frozen biological samples. The present review illustrates some examples of recently recovered pathogens after being buried for millions of years, including some identified viable ancient viruses, bacteria and even other forms of life. While some pathogens could be revived, genomes of other ancient pathogens which could not be revived were re-constructed. The present study aims to highlight and alarm the hidden aspect of global warming on the international public health, which represents future threats from the past for humanity. Keywords Emerging diseases . Global warming . Mollivirus sibericum . Pithovirus sibericum
Introduction With the continuous evolution and emergence of new unknown pathogens in the last decades, such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, and recently SARS2 (Covid-19), it is clear that international public health faces severe challenges. However, the re-emergence of serious infectious diseases which were previously partially or completely eradicated represents a similar public health hazard. One of the main reasons for the reoccurrence of eradicated diseases is attributed to the global warming. Among the most underestimated harmful effects of the global warming is the melting of the ice layer and the release of buried materials since decades including radioactive wastes (Colgan et al. 2016), and liberates billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane gas into the air (Knoblauch et al. 2018), and could even release a huge amount of trapped heavy metals to the surrounding environment and groundwater (McConnell et al. 2018).
Responsible Editor: Lotfi Aleya * Mohamed Kamel [email protected] 1
Department of Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt
Thawing of frozen snow may also liberate frozen biological materials since tens and hundreds of thousands of years, including ancient viruses and bacteria. Microbiological examination of tissue samples obtained from a frozen mammoth in Siberian revealed the presence of members of the genera Carnobacterium and Lactosphera, which could be cultured on anaerobic media (El-Sayed and Kamel 2020; Pikuta et al. 2011). Similarly, examination of the gut mi
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