The effects of climate change are being witnessed in a wide range of settings – from changes in crop yields due to erratic weather patterns to species extinction. Another effect could be an increased risk of “viral spillover” in some regions, which could cause new pandemics in the next few years, according to new research.
Climate change could shift the species range of certain viral vectors and reservoirs northward, and the High Arctic could become fertile ground for emerging pandemics. The result was drawn from a research paper titled “Risk of virus spillover increases with climate change in high Arctic lake sediments,” published Wednesday (Oct. 19) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the biological research journal of Britain’s The Royal. Company.
What is virus shedding?
Viruses are some of the most widespread entities on Earth, but in order to replicate they need to infect a host cell. According to the research, these virus-host relationships appear relatively stable within superkingdoms, major groupings of organisms. However, below this level, viruses can infect a new host from the host reservoir (in which they usually reside) by being able to persist in the new host – a process defined as “virus shedding”.
To investigate the possibility of the virus spreading, researchers at 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 performed DNA and RNA sequencing to reconstruct the composition of the viruses in the lake area. They estimated the risk of spillover and found that the chance of the virus moving to a new host increases with runoff from melting glaciers, which they see as a proxy for climate change. As temperatures rise, so does the melting of glaciers, and there is a greater chance that previously trapped viruses and bacteria will find new hosts.
Result
In this study, although the risk of viral spread was found to increase with local environmental changes caused by global warming, this alone does not guarantee a higher possibility of a viral pandemic. “Overall, we have provided here a new approach to assessing spillover risk… This is not the same as predicting spillovers or even pandemics,” the authors said.
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