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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kumar who wrote (97123)	5/1/2003 8:15:40 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The cause of SARS has been found, to a reasonable degree of medical probability, based on Koch's postulates. It is a coronavirus. Unfortunately, coronaviruses mutate quite easily, because they only have a single string of RNA, so they make transcription errors easily, and also combine with other coronaviruses easily. Nobody in the field is projecting a "cure" because viruses don't have "cures." Optimistic people in the field are hoping for a vaccine within two years, and hoping that it doesn't mutate too much between then and now. Personally, I am hoping that they figure out a way to speed up creation of more generic vaccines, to reduce the turn-around time for specific vaccines, but they don't have that technology now. I gather, from the way that India is responding to SARS, that fatalism is part of the culture. Unless there is a genetic reason or lifestyle reason for Indians to be less susceptible than Chinese, I expect the experience in India to be far, far worse.