To be definitively declared the cause of SARS, the novel virus must satisfy three conditions known as Koch's postulates. These were devised in 1890 by the German scientist Robert Koch, initially for anthrax infections. I don't like seeing the word anthrax attached to this story, in any way, shape or form! And no, I'm not being paranoid, just couldn't help noticing the word.
2 posted on
04/02/2003 11:12:49 PM PST by
ET(end tyranny)
(Heavenly Father, please embrace, and protect, our Pres., our troops and those of our true allies.)
Don't worry about that. It just happens to be the disease that the inital postulates were formulated on. The first effective vaccine developed by Louis Pasteur was for anthrax in 1881. The anthrax bacterium had first been observed in 1849 and 1863, but Koch was the first to identify it as the causative agent for anthrax and to isolate the
Bacillus anthracis microorganism in a pure culture. Pasteur and Koch, in fact, had quite a row about the research. You can read more about it here, if you're interested: http://www.foundersofscience.net/past_koc.htm
It's good to see confirmation that virus is not, in fact, truly airborne. I had always supected such. The high number of infected people (mostly health care workers) indicates that the virus is probably a bit more infective than a basic coronavirus, resulting in more people infected because it was not something they were used to, and thus did not take more stringent precuations. A friend of mine, who is a professor at Vanderbilt, is taking a trip to (of all places) Toronto in the near future. He firmly believes that the threat to the general population is quite low.
This is a nasty bug, to be sure, but it is controllable.