[Eric in the Ozarks]

There is evidence that this disease jumped the animal-human boundry. In rural China, people are fond of keeping ducks, chickens and pigs near their homes and its quite possible that the disease has been incubating in the animal population, without regard to the number of nearby people.

[CJ Wolf]

It comes from dogfood, er dogs as food.

[cake_crumb]

"There is evidence that this disease jumped the animal-human boundry"

Um....this class of virus jumps from animals to people every year. Pigs to people, to be precise, then drifts over the rest of the world in a yearly version (or versions, because sometimes there are two or three) generically termed Type (number here) Asian Flu.

The media hysteria hyping over this is getting on my nerves. I love the way the public just knows it's the plague now. We're all gonna die, just like with The Stand. When I go to Google News in the morning, I have to SEARCH for news about Iraq, Afghanistan, Galloway and Israel, for instance, because the headlines are all SARS, SARS, SARS, SARS.

West Nile mutates, and it killed a lot more people in North America than SARS has.