Tue, 15 Apr 2003
Living in the age of acceleration
There are times when I suddenly realise that we are living in
the 21st century, and although large chunks of it are not what we were
hoping for, some bits are good.
Take SARS. (Not literally, you understand.) Horrible plague, bioweapon, or
plain mutant cold virus? It only escaped from China a month ago, and wasn't
known before the beginning of the year, but
just 31 days into the investigation they've sequenced the viral genome responsible.
Henry Niman of Harvard Medical School said the new data shows that part
of the SARS genome is similar to certain avian viruses. That jibes with
earlier reports that SARS may have jumped from bird to human.
"I was playing around with the sequence, and at the far right-hand
end is a sequence that's also found in two avian coronaviruses,"
Niman said. "Thirty-two nucleotides are exact matches between the SARS
coronavirus, avian bronchitis virus and turkey coronavirus."
That's potentially significant, he said, because the sequence had only
been found in these two avian coronaviruses up until now. It has never
before appeared in a mammalian coronavirus.
Wow. We're not out of the woods yet -- they're at least a year away from
a vaccune -- but it's astonishing how fast they've homed in on the
cause. Some things really are better, this decade, and our ability to
respond to a wholly new hybrid virus seems to be among them.
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