A few days ago I overheard a radio station in which there was an interview of a Chinese technician who claimed that SARS had originated from a biological research lab in China, and that one individual there had gotten infected and unwittingly had spread it. Now I know this sounds like a stretch, but from the news it seems like SARS is pretty nasty.
Unfortunately, I don’t recall what radio station it was…has anyone else heard of such similar theories? Is it possible that SARS is a biological weapon set loose?
If it is, it is not as deadly as one may have thought. If you are a healthy person and you detect it early, your chances are pretty good of living. As for the virus itself, that is the scary part, that it spreads so easily.
Another out there theory was that China released the weapon on itself to quell their population problems… Thats scary…
Actually, SARS isn’t “pretty nasty.” It only kills about 4% of those infected, making the other 96% just pretty sick for 10 days or so. This would make for a rather ineffective biological weapon. A useful (!) bioweapon would be effective only if it were deadlier – such as anthrax or smallpox, for example.
It’s the lamest disease to attack with, anyway. They’d have better luck developing a stronger influenza strain than killing signifigant numbers with SARS.
I know next to nothing about biological warfare, but I’d think a virus that spread easily and made people “pretty sick” would be effective in the same way it may be preferable to wound rather than kill on the battlefield. Wounded/sick combatants can require tremendous resources to be expended on their behalf.