What are the causes and symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)?
In mid-April 2003, Canadian scientists at the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Vancouver announced that they that sequenced the genome of the coronavirus most likely to be the cause of SARS. Within days, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, offered a genomic map that confirmed more than 99% of the Canadian findings. Both genetic maps were generated from studies of viruses isolated from SARS cases. The particular coronavirus mapped had a genomic sequence of 29,727 nucleotides—average for the family of coronavirus that typically contain between 29,000-31,000 nucleotides. Proof that the coronavirus mapped was the specific virus responsible for SARS would eventually come from animal testing. Rhesus monkeys were exposed to the virus via injection and inhalation and then monitored to determine whether SARS like symptoms developed, and then if sick animals exhibited a histological pathology (i.e., an examination of the tissue and cellular level path
