SARS ‘came from space’

SARS may have come from space, according to a novel theory aired by a trio of astrobiologists in Britain and India.

SARS may have come from space, according to a novel theory aired by a trio of astrobiologists in Britain and India.The scientists suggest a small amount of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus may have entered the atmosphere east of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, and then been deposited in southern China.In a letter to British medical weekly The Lancet, they say the idea came from experiments, carried out in January 2001, in which a tethered, sterile balloon collected samples from the stratosphere.”Large quantities of viable micro-organisms” were captured at an altitude of 41,000 metres, they say.Translated for the globe, that would mean “a tonne of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily”. The sheer volume of micro-organisms raises the possibility that some of them would survive and a few might prove to be bacteria or viruses that were dangerous for humans, the trio say.”The annals of medical history detail many examples of plagues and pestilences that can be attributed to space incident microbes in this way.”New epidemic diseases have a record of abrupt entrances from time to time, and equally abrupt retreats.”The letter says that the great flu pandemic of 1918-19, which killed tens of millions of people, may have been just such an example of a disease sown from space.In the case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the letter claims to make a “prima facie” argument for the space bug theory.”All reasonable attempts” should be made to halt the disease’s infective spread, it says.But the scientists warn, SARS will continue, and cases of it will pop up almost anywhere on the planet, “until the stratospheric supply of the causative agent becomes exhausted”.The letter is written by Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University’s Centre for Astrobiology, Milton Wainwright, of Sheffield University’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and Jayant Narlikar of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India.Many astrobiologists contend that life on Earth is not an enclosed evolutionary kettle, but a biosphere that has been influenced by arrivals from space.One theory, called “pan-spermia,” suggests that life on Earth was kickstarted by bugs or constituent chemicals which hitchhiked a ride on an asteroid or comet that collided with the planet.The mainstream medical theory about the SARS virus is that it is an animal virus that mutated and leapt the species barrier.It could have crossed from farm animals to man, most probably in Guangdong, southern China, last year. (Source: The Daily Telegraph, 23may 2003)