Here’s an interesting theory: could SARS have come to us from outer space?
Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, and his colleagues suggest in a letter to the scientific journal The Lancet that the SARS virus may have arrived with the 2,200 pounds of bacterial material that falls to the planet every day. That’s 20,000 bacteria per square meter of the Earth’s surface.
Some of this material is “highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life that exists on Earth,” Wickramasinghe wrote in the letter.
This, he wrote, “raises the possibility that pathogenic bacteria and viruses might also be introduced.”
So, here’s a fun little idea my sci-fi fed, conspiracy-theory enjoying little brain cooked up…
There were reports a few years back that cosmonauts aboard the Russian Mir space station had found a “mutant space bug” that was damaging the space station:
Engineers later learned that the fungi also damaged electronic equipment on Mir, including a control block for a communications device used on the outpost from 1997 to 1998 during the 24th main mission to Mir.
The microorganisms crept under the steel cover of the block and sat on electrical contacts and polyurethane pieces. As a result, parts of copper cables located nearby also were oxidized.
Subsistence for the microorganisms was certainly not the metal, glass and plastic of those devices, said Natalia Novikova, a deputy chief of the Department at the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in Moscow.
“They consume organic stuff which consists of skin epithelia, lipids and other products of human activity,” Novikova said. “These products get into the station atmosphere from human breath, sweat etc.—and stick to the station?s surfaces.”
“Bacteria and fungi eat this stuff and generate products of metabolism, particularly organic acids which can corrode steel, glass and plastic.”
Not long after those reports came out, Mir came tumbling out of the sky, with over 27 tons of debris falling into the Pacific Ocean.
So…what if this mutant space bug that consumes organic matter was carried along on some of the debris on its way down to earth, was released into the ocean, and between prevailing currents and being ingested by or infecting fish, eventually made its way to China? One of the theories as to the source of the virus is that it came from the civet cat, “a fishing cat eaten by some Chinese people.”
So…
Space virus —> Mir —> ocean —> fish —> civet cat —> people —> SARS
Possible?
