 SARS Came from Space
|
May 23, 2003 — In a letter that appears in Saturday's issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, they said the idea for this 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 meters (133,250 feet), they said.
Translated for the globe, that means "a ton of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily," the trio said.
|
 |
The sheer volume of this stream of micro-organisms raises the possibility that some of them will survive and a few may prove to be bacteria or viruses that are dangerous for humans, they contended.
"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 said.
The letter said that the great flu pandemic of 1918-19, which slew tens of millions of people, may have been just such an example of a disease sown from space.
Epidemiologists have always been intrigued about how this pathogen spread so quickly and infiltrated remote communities, at a time when there was no jet travel, and also how it disappeared so abruptly.
In the case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the letter argues that a small amount of the virus may have entered the atmosphere east of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, and was deposited in southern China.
"All reasonable attempts" should be made to halt the disease's infective spread, it said.
But in the longer term, 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," it contended.
The letter was written by Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University's Center for Astrobiology; Milton Wainwright of Sheffield University's Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology; and Jayant Narlikar of the Inter-University Center 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 idea, initially ridiculed, is now taken seriously, although the "disease-from-space" idea is still very marginal.
The mainstream medical theory about the SARS virus is that it is an animal virus that mutated and leapt the species barrier. It crossed from farm animals to man, most probably in Guangdong, southern China, last year.
< news main
