SARS from Mars?
From behind the Red Wall,
or the Red Planet?

The following article appeared in various Canadian news sources back on May 23, 2003 based on research and comments by some UK scientists. This story broke the same day as the Civet Cat theory, but for some reason did not seem to get much play in international media, and was never mentioned again falling in the shadow of the "It`s the Chinese people's fault" theory. Read it over, tell me what you think. Maybe not SARS, but does the general theory of microbial introduction by this method hold any weight?

Astrobiologists say the mysterious SARS virus might have come from outer space, raining down on Earth along with tonnes of space bacteria.

"In the absence of a convincing story in the opposite direction, I'm pretty convinced," said Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in Wales.

Prof. Wickramasinghe believes that the first life on Earth came from comets that bombarded the planet four billion years ago, and that cosmic dust containing bacteria and viruses is still penetrating the stratosphere and finding its way to the planet's surface today.

The professor and two of his colleagues are the authors of a letter about the theory, which appears in tomorrow's issue of The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal.

"The annals of medical history detail many examples of plagues and pestilences that can be attributed to space incident microbes in this way," they write. "New epidemic diseases have a record of abrupt entrances from time to time, and equally abrupt retreats."

Severe acute respiratory syndrome has infected at least 8,000 people and killed nearly 700 worldwide, and is believed to have originated in China's southern Guangdong province in November, 2002. It was spread globally through air travel.

SARS is believed to be caused by a coronavirus, the family of viruses that cause many human colds and respiratory diseases in animals. Many scientists believe animals might have passed the virus to humans, but how it made the leap is still unknown.

Prof. Wickramasinghe said evidence supports his theory: The SARS virus appeared without warning, and in China. The theory holds that since the stratosphere is thinnest over the Himalayas, comet dust could more easily filter down to the surface there.

Earth is constantly moving through comet dust, the professor pointed out, and rain could help microbes descend.

"It's not some alternative, airy-fairy rubbish," said Dr. Milton Wainwright, a co-author of the letter in The Lancet and a molecular biologist at Sheffield University in England.

"We know microbes can survive all kinds of conditions, including those found in space. It's not scientifically, by any means, ridiculous."

But experts who have been investigating the spread of SARS said the outer space hypothesis is outlandish.

Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, chuckled and said the theory provided a welcome "moment of levity."

"We have no scientific evidence that SARS or any other infectious disease has dropped off a meteor at this point in time, but we have an open mind," she said. "We don't know the source of the coronavirus, but we have many hypotheses that are far more plausible than meteorites."

Dr. Frank Plummer, scientific director of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, said the theory is "highly unlikely."

Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital, said: "Why not say that it came from the middle of the Earth?"