sars (Page 2)

Researchers say most of the human diseases of the future will be passed to us from animals. Right now, bird flu from Asian chicken farms is killing people in Vietnam. That seems too far away to affect us, but then so did SARS, when it was first discovered in China. The World Health Organization thinks avian flu may become an even bigger epidemic than SARS. In South Korea, Vietnam and Japan, officials are killing massive numbers of chickens, trying to prevent the spread of avian flu to more humans. All the people who’ve contracted the flu have gotten it directly from poultry; there’s been no person-to-person contact so far. If the flu virus can be controlled before it mutates to a form that allows people to pass it on, the epidemic will be stopped before it starts.
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Two new cases of SARS in China brings back fears that the epidemic may return. China is destroying large numbers of civet cats, the carriers of the disease, but the man who has just recovered from SARS says he’s never eaten the animal. A second suspected case is a 20-year-old waitress who worked in a restaurant serving wild game. Researcher Zhong Nanshan says the new SARS strain is more “human-like,” making it even more infectious than the strain that caused the previous outbreak.
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Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) spreads so quickly and is so hard to treat, despite being related to the common cold, because it’s formed from a rare combination of mammalian and avian viruses. That makes it unrecognizable by human immune systems.

Geneticist David Guttman found that the proteins on the left side of the virus comes from mammals, such as cats, cows and mice, while the proteins on the right come from birds, such as chickens and ducks. The middle part of the virus is a mix of both.

Our immune systems would usually recognize a coronavirus of bird origin, as most flu is, and start fighting it immediately. However, the part of it that originated with mammals allows it to sneak past our immune systems.
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House cats and ferrets can get the SARS virus and can probably pass it on to us. This makes sense given that the virus originated with civet cats in China, before it jumped to humans. Disease expert Robert Shope says, “You might want to quarantine the pets as well as the people.”

But housecats didn’t play a direct role in the recent SARS epidemics, despite the fact that infected cats were found in a Hong Kong apartment complex where there was a SARS epidemic last year. “These animals in all likelihood did not play a significant role in spread of (SARS) to humans,” says Dr. Klaus Stohr, the World Health Organization’s chief SARS scientist.
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