Can flu viruses survive winter in frozen lakes? (Catherine Brahic)

  Catherine Brahic -- NewScientist.com

  Nov. 29, 2006 -- Evidence of flu viruses frozen in Siberian lakes has prompted researchers to examine the possibility that global warming may release microbes locked in glaciers for decades or even centuries.

  “Our hypothesis is that influenza can survive in ice over the winter and re-infect birds as they come back in spring,” says Scott Rogers of Bowling Green State University, Ohio, US. He believes the frozen lakes act as "melting pots" for flu viruses, allowing viruses from one year to mix with those from previous years.

  Rogers has spent decades searching ice for micro-organisms. He teamed up with Dany Shoham at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and David Gilichinsky, at the Russian Academy of Sciences, to obtain samples of ice from Siberian lakes where migratory birds stop.

  The group looked for pieces of genetic material from flu viruses in ice taken from three lakes that freeze and thaw each year. In the lake that is most visited by migratory birds, Lake Park, they found fragments of RNA coding for haemagglutinin, the surface protein that allows flu viruses to bind to the cells they infect.

  Genetic analysis revealed the haemagglutinin was most closely related to an H1-strain flu virus that was around in the 1930s and later resurfaced in the 1960s.

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