Did SARS Land With Star Dust?

[pappagooch]

* I didnt find this in a search & it's a bit older news, but interesting nonetheless!*

The cure for the SARS virus might be especially elusive if the organism is not of this earth.

A group of scientists in the United Kingdom asserts that the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome may hail from outer space. The idea might sound like a joke, but the scientists are quite serious.

Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, and his colleagues suggest in a letter to the scientific journal The Lancet that the SARS virus may have arrived with 2,200 pounds of bacterial material that fall to the planet every day. That's 20,000 bacteria per square meter of the Earth's surface.

Some of this material is "highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life that exists on Earth," Wickramasinghe wrote in the letter.

This, he wrote, "raises the possibility that pathogenic bacteria and viruses might also be introduced."

Other researchers are skeptical.

"We have no scientific evidence that SARS or any other infectious disease has dropped off a meteor at this point in time, but we have an open mind," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists on Friday said they found evidence that the virus comes from the civet cat, a fishing cat eaten by some Chinese people. Others previously theorized the virus may have jumped from a type of exotic bird in Guangdong province, where SARS first emerged in November 2002.

SARS, which can lead to death from symptoms of pneumonia, has infected almost 8,000 people worldwide and has killed 666, according to the World Health Organization.

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