severe acute respiratory syndrome

(Vanderbilt University Medical Center) To understand how the virus that caused SARS -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- may have jumped from bats to humans, a team of investigators from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has generated a synthetic SARS-like bat coronavirus.

The virus -- the largest replicating synthetic organism ever made -- is infectious in cultured cells and mice, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) The Plague of Athens is one of 10 historically notable outbreaks described in an article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases by authors from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The phenomenon of widespread, socially disruptive disease outbreaks has a long history prior to HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, H5N1 avian influenza and other emerging diseases of the modern era, note the authors.

(NIH/National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) NIAID will award five-year contracts estimated to be up to $68.7 million to establish programs in Systems Biology for Infectious Disease Research at four research institutions.

Scientists at each facility will apply novel techniques to study diseases that include severe acute respiratory syndrome, tuberculosis and influenza.

Scientists who have studied the genome of the virus that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome say their comparisons to related viruses offer new evidence that the virus infecting humans originated in bats.

The analysis tracing the viruses' paths through human and animal hosts counters assertions that SARS was eradicated in 2004 when thousands of palm civet cats in China were identified as the original source and killed in an effort to eliminate the risk of new outbreaks.