From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 17:45:02 MDT
On Sun, 27 Apr 2003, Phil Osborn wrote:
> As any serious search will reveal, SARS is quite
> capable of killing healthy young individuals, but of
> course the elderly or immune-compromised are at
> special risk.
True. My previous comments on the fatality rate
appear to be low due to the early statistics being
used. It now looks like the fatality rate is up
in the 7-10% range.
> A research scientist friend of mine with good DoD
> connections tells me that he has info to the effect
> that DoD gives SARS a 50% chance of being a bioweapon
> that got away, presumeably from the Chinese.
I'd question that. There are enough nasty bugs out there
living in hosts humans don't encounter frequently (would
you like to discuss the various bacteria and viruses that
live in or on insects?) that it only takes a single crossover
from a species that has learned to live with it to humans
that haven't to cause a world of grief.
Everything I've seen so far suggests its genetic makeup
is far enough away from any known virus that it would have
required a world class feat of genetic engineering (beyond
anything anyone else has managed yet) to pull off the
engineering of a virus this complex.
The virus has a 30K genome of RNA and has a number of
overlapping genes. I would assert that humans currently
lack the talent to produce something that large and
especially compress a genome to allow overlapping genes.
Nature manages to accomplish this through a lot of trial
and error.
Robert
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