‘Zombie’ virus awakened by the ice: after 48,500 years it is still a threat

The risk is there, and it could turn into a threat: warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost (frozen layer of soil underground) and potentially re-circulating viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands years, could threaten animal and human health. To deal with the uncertainty caused by the possible consequences that viruses ‘asleep’ for millennia could unleash on mankind, a group of researchers from the French University of Aix-Marseille has thawed seven of them and analyzed them in the laboratory: one of these has 48,500