SARS

Natural History, June, 2003 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

On February 11 authorities in China's Guangdong Province issued their first report of what they called an "atypical pneumonia." A global network of scientists began urgently exchanging news and findings via the Internet. Just two months later, they had positively identified the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). And, more remarkably, in those same few weeks two separate teams had sequenced its genome--all of its approximately 30,000 nucleotides. What made it all possible was the Internet. To learn how investigators responded so rapidly, visit the World Health Organization's Web page (www.who.int/en) and click on the "SAILS" box. Under "For More Information," click on "WHO Collaborative Networks" and follow the Web trail there.

The SARS bug is a member of a group known as the coronaviruses, one or more of which are responsible for some common colds. At a site provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/) you can consult the page choices on the left for both general and practical information about SARS--everything from "What Everyone Should Know" to travel advisories and fact sheets on quarantines.

To find out what the enemy looks like, go to www.rkm.com.au/VIRUS/CORONAVIRUS/index.html. In the artist's image of a single virion, you can see the "crown" ofclublike projections for which the group of viruses was named. Click on any one of the drawings on the main page and scroll down: the illustrations are accompanied by information about viral replication and disease transmission, and there are also links to other sites. At the link "Coronaviruses and SARS" for example, Alan Cann, a virologist at the University of Leicester in England, has synthesized what is known about the disease to date. Cann's site is a good place to look for up-to-date, though fairly technical, information on infectious diseases in general. (You can access the site directly at www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/coronaviruses.html.)

Other viruses, many quite beautiful to look at, are depicted and described at the "Big Picture Book of Viruses" (virology. net/Big_Virology/BVHomePage.html), and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Molecular Virology (virology.wisc.edu/IMV/).

Finally, in a short article posted by the University of California at Los Angeles (www.college.ucla.edu/webproject/micro12/m12webnotes/viralevolution.htm), you can learn about viral evolution and its role in the epidemics of the past century. Some, like the influenza virus, are occasionally transmitted to people via contact with birds or other animals harboring new strains. That, incidentally, may well be the transmission path of the SARS virus.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.