The
first reported case was November 16, 2002
in the industrial town of Foshan. 5
A 48-year-old Chinese man made seven international flights (visiting
London England, Barcelona Spain, and Frankfurt Germany ) before
he was admitted to the Hong Kong hospital. He survived but his identity
remains anonymous.
On February
22, 2003, the initial Hong Kong patient, a medical professor
from the Sun-Yat-sen
University (Pr JL L, of ZhongShan Da Xue) in the Guangdong
province was admitted in serious condition to Kwong
Wah hospital. He warned the staff attending him that he had
caught an extremely contagious disease while attending patients
at the hospital where he worked. 4
Others report that the first hospitalized case of Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS), a fast-spreading and sometimes lethal viral infection
was on March 7, 2003 near Guangzhou,
southern China.
According
to the CDC,
SARS generally "begins with a fever greater
than 100.4°F [>38.0°C]. Other symptoms may include headache,
an overall feeling of discomfort, and body aches. Some people also
experience mild respiratory symptoms. After 2 to 7 days, SARS patients
may develop a dry cough and have trouble breathing."
Spread
As of
April 22, 2003, SARS has already spread to the USA: See
where.
Genetic
Code
Sequencing
is the process of determining the genetic code of an organism. The
SARS virus was sequenced on April 16, 2003 by the Beijing Genomics
Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Similar institutes
in Canada and the US have also sequenced samples.
"On
April 12, the 29,736-nucleotide
genome sequence of the virus was completed by a team at the
Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver, which was not
a formal member of the network. The US Centers for Disease Control
(CDC), part of the network, followed two days later by publishing
its own sequence, slightly shorter at 29,727 nucleotides but
otherwise differing by only "about ten base-pairs, a trivial
difference," according to Julie Gerberding, director of the
CDC.)"
(biomedcentral.com)
According
to sequence matching database reports, SARS has bits and pieces
of several coronaviruses (pig and mouse) but also sequences that
do not match any known virus. See comparison.
(from Rense.com)
SARS
is a single-stranded RNA virus like HIV.
In
the first cases, 95 per cent of SARS patients respond to a cocktail
of anti-viral drug Ribavirin and steroids. Mutation, viral load
or a second virus has resulted in less successful treatment and
has stumped scientists. (straitstimes.asia1.com)
Rapid Mutation
The virus
is mutating rapidly. "A few nucleotide
differences among individual genomes were detected ... the virus
is expected to mutate very fast and easily," said the Beijing
Genomics Institute. (news.ft.com)
Chinese
scientists found that the bacteria chlamydia
is one of the main pathogens consistently found in cases of Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which first appeared. (news.com.au)
Could it be that people in that area already had the chlamydia?
SARS spreads via the air, but chlamydia is normally spread only
by vaginal or anal intercourse or from a woman to her fetus during
birth. The obscure and discarded theory of extreme
pleomorphism says that bacteria and viruses are sometimes
different stages of the same organism. With what we know today,
this seems wrong, but ... does the SARS RNA sequence match the
RNA or DNA of the coexisting chlamydia bacteria? Perhaps no one
has checked because the idea is strange.
Fox
news reported that a rare form of airborne chlamydia may accompany
the SARS virus. Chlamydia bacteria have a unique 48 hour developmental
cycle. Two morphological forms are recognized, the smaller highly
infective ELEMENTARY BODY, which is capable of extracellular survival,
and the RETICULATE BODY, which is found intracellularly and is
the replicating form. Both forms contain RNA and DNA. Chlamydia
pneumoniae was discovered by Dr. J. Thomas Grayston, professor
of epidemiology at the UW School of Public Health and Community
Medicine in the mid-1980's. This form of Chlamydia floats around
in the air and can infect the lungs.
Coronaviruses
were first isolated from chickens in 1937. 2
Coronavirus is a genus of pleomorphic
viruses which look like coronas or halos when viewed with a microscope.
It is the single genus
of the family Coronaviridae.
Dr.
David Heymann, executive director in charge of communicable diseases
for the organization, said the agency was "99 percent sure"
that severe acute respiratory syndrome was caused by the new coronavirus
based on the monkey experiments that were conducted in the Netherlands.
- 4/16/03
SF Gate
Are
we certain
SARS is caused by this coronavirus? According to biomedcentral.com
Frank Plummer's National
Microbiology Laboratory using very sensitive PCR techniques
only detected minute amounts of coronavirus in about half the
cases of SARS and detected some virus in people without SARS.
5
SARS
Origin
There
are only a few possibilities.
1.
The virus mutated from some known animal virus.
Scientists
in China found evidence of the SARS virus in three species
of mammals (  exotic
animals ) "for sale at a food market in Shenzhen."
... "He Jianfan, director of microbiology at the Shenzhen
Disease Prevention and Control Centre, said he believes the
results indicate that the workers caught the virus from the
animals, developed a mild form of the disease but then the
virus  mutated
into a more virulent form before it was passed on to other
humans." - news24
What animals were they eating? Himalayan
palm civets, raccoon
dogs ( Yes, they are really DOGS, not racoons. How about
we stop killing
dogs for fur as well as eating them?) and badgers.
The human virus was found to be identical to SARS found in
the ferret-like civet cats -- except for having a deletion
of 29 fewer nucleotides in the N-protein. That's not much
of a difference when you consider that the virus has around
29,727
nucleotides. Having
a slightly larger virus in the civet suggests that the virus
started there and then migrated to humans. It is still possible
that humans or other mammals infected the civets.
The
Beijing Times said that monkeys, snakes, and bats were targeted
in Guangdong where the global Sars outbreak originated. Monkeys!?
Are people in China really eating primates? I found this
site: "Guangdong Dish: good
at cooking snakes, racoon dogs and monkeys; the flavor is
mainly light, crisp, tasty and fresh." The world
is shrinking. As a result, people eating civet cats, dogs
and monkeys on the other side of the world may indirectly
result in the death of people you know. Interesting, isn't
it?
2.
It came from outer space (see our article on panspermia.)
We
have strong evidence that the SARS virus crossed the species
boundries between man and other mammals, but we still don't
know much about the source of the virus. SARS may have come
from space. Note: a month after this article was written CNN
also came out with this idea.
Nikolai
Filatov, Moscow's head of epidemiological services, told
the Gazeta daily that he thought the pneumonia was man-made
because "there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up
is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population
is not immune to it". The virus, according to Academy
of Medicine member Sergei
Kolesnikov, is a cocktail of mumps and measles, whose
mix could never appear in nature. "We
can only get that in a laboratory," he told a conference
in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, quoted by RIA Novosti news
agency. It
may have spread because of an "accidental leak"
from a lab, he said.
(abc.net.au)
The
above statement may be due to early
reports from labs in Germany
and Hong Kong of detection of paramyxoviruses which include
respiratory syncytial virus and the viruses that cause measles
and mumps. They are so common, however, it is possible that
the detected particles were "background" viruses,
and not the actual or single cause of SARS.
The
following are one
person's predictions for a possible spread of this
disease. I think these are infections, not deaths.
| low |
high |
date |
| 3982 |
4269 |
April
30 |
| 7358 |
7887 |
May
31 |
| 12810 |
13732 |
June
28 |
| 24624 |
26396 |
July
31 |
| 45495 |
48769 |
August
31 |
| 82407 |
88338 |
September
30 |
Spreading
Rumors Illegal in China
Chinese
authorities arrested 13 people in Guangdong for spreading rumours
about the Sars
epidemic through text messages on mobile phones. Are all text
messages are monitored in China? I guess they have to do something,
but what a sick world (pardon the pun) where passing wrong information
to your friends and family results in your arrest and detention!
One person was fined 200 yuan (S$43) and detained for 15 days according
to the Wen
Wei Po daily.
Will
our own public health authorities impose quarantines ( which are
by definition deprivations of liberty ) like those in Beijing –
with thousands of employees and patients forcibly restricted in
hospitals? Even
if you don't have SARS, will you be isolated in some holding area
because the government claims you were exposed? Will police arrest
people who refuse medical treatment as some fear in Australia?
If you think it couldn't happen here read this: Bush
Order Allows Quarantine of Sars Cases (Reuters, 4 APR 03). Also,
you should really read about the MSEHPA.
|
