Zombie viruses awaken again to turn the world into a nightmare

The recent pandemic has left people fearful. Fear is inevitable, as is suspicion when faced with the cough or sneeze of the person in the seat next to you, whether in the cinema or on the subway car. Although the health alert has ceased, it will take decades to overcome the psychological damage of the coronavirus. Everything will depend on our sensitivity to reduce the ghosts of fear. Erasing the trace is not going to be easy. We have lived immersed in a dystopian novel in which it is difficult to turn the page.

In this plan, the assault on memory takes us to the novel Jurassic Park, where its author, Michael Crichton, devised a plot based on a biological fact as original as the rescue of dinosaur DNA from the blood of a mosquito preserved in amber for millions of years. Something that is scientifically impossible. Because if it had been ice instead of amber, Crichton would have been closer to science and also to reality, since it would have been possible to rescue the genetic code from frozen blood.

This is something that is novel if we look at the recent pandemic, because, apparently, the permafrost (the frozen layer of soil in the polar regions) is melting with global warming and, with it, is awakening zombie viruses that had been inactive for millions of years. It is known that the oldest is the Pandoravirus, an infectious microorganism that belongs to the family of giant viruses and that can be up to 10 times larger than a common virus, but not as large as its cousin, the Pithovirus sibericum, which, according to It seems, due to its size, it can be seen with a magnifying glass.

We must remember the anthrax outbreak that occurred in 2016 in the Siberian tundra that killed a good number of reindeer and that ended the life of a child

It seems like the plot of a B-movie of those that Roger Corman was filming or that Alex de la Iglesia could well be filming. However, to be realistic, we must remember the anthrax outbreak that occurred in 2016 in the Siberian tundra that killed a good number of reindeer and ended the life of a child. The origin took place in melted permafrost. It was when, presumably, the ancient spores of Bacillus anthracis woke up, microscopic cellular bodies that had remained dormant in the frozen corpse of a reindeer that had contracted the infection.

It is not to be alarmist, but, given what has been suffered by the coronavirus, new pandemics cannot be ruled out. Especially if it is a zombie virus that revives to scare us and puts our fear to the test every time someone sneezes nearby and we say “Jesus” or “Cheers”, and we don’t exactly say it out of habit, but out of a superstition that It comes from ancient times; since ancient Greece, when sneezing was the sign that something had entered the body and for each sneeze Zeus was named.

Christianity changed the name of the gods, but the fear continued. The rest is history, the substance of which time is made when time no longer belongs to us.

The Stone Ax is a section where Montero Glez, with a desire for prose, exercises his particular siege of scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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