Not as lunatic as it sounds.
Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe et al are proposing a extra-terrestrial origin for the SARS virus based on patterns of infection and its novelty. You may have heard of Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe. If you haven't he's one of the really massive brains working in Astronomy at the moment, currently based in Cardiff's Astrobiology department. The idea goes along the lines of the "Panspermia" idea he developed with Sir Fred Hoyle, which proposed that life on earth was seeded by material from comet matter.
The reason I bring it up is that while the idea is exciting and novel, it has a few issues classics graduates might want to take issue with. Like the lines:
"The patterns of spread of ... diseases, as charted by historians, are often difficult to explain simply on the basis of endemic infective agents. Historical epidemics such as the plague of Athens and the plague of Justinian come to mind. "
Counter-wise independently, dumping of large amounts of comet dust on the earth have been proposed for periods around 500 BC-ish and AD 500-ish by astronomer Duncan Steel in the first place and dendrochronologist Mike Baillie in the second.
If you're interested in reading the full text in the Lancet, you'll need to register (free) at www.thelancet.com and you can read it in HTML at:
http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol361/iss9371/full/llan.361.9371.correspondence.25778.1 or in PDF at
http://pdf.thelancet.com/pdfdownload?uid=llan.361.9371.correspondence.25778.1&x=x.pdf
provided you scroll to the last page of the PDF.
Alun
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