By ANNE McILROY
SCIENCE REPORTER
May. 23, 2003
Globe and Mail
SARS may have come from outer space, says a controversial astronomer, and fallen to the Earth along with the tonne of micro-organisms that drop from the sky every day.
Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in Britain, has put forward in the past the theory that disastrous influenza outbreaks and even bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad-cow disease) may have originated in space.
In a letter to the British medical journal The Lancet, he says there is enough evidence to suggest that SARS fell to earth. Chinese authorities have reported that the seven people in the province of Guangdong who were the first to be infected with the virus had no contact with each other. Dr. Wickramasinghe says that the Chinese government has also been unable to document how a large number of SARS patients got the disease.
"This leaves open the question of where the virus came from," Dr. Wickramasinghe said in an interview yesterday, adding that most microbiologists and virologists will dispute his claim that SARS fell from the sky.
Earl Brown, a virologist at the University of Ottawa, describes that idea as "very, very far-fetched," but says he is reluctant to completely rule it out.
The coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome is a new one, and no one is sure where it came from. Most researchers believe it is a mutated version of a virus that originally infected animals. But the SARS virus is only distantly related to other known coronaviruses, which cause a range of diseases in animals and humans, Dr. Brown says.
In January, 2001, Dr. Wickramasinghe was part of a team that launched a balloon into the stratosphere in an attempt to collect micro-organisms. They discovered that the air 41 kilometres above the Earth was rich in bacteria, which, they argued, could only have come from space.