SARS: Only the Beginning?

Posting Date: 08/25/2003

SARS/Other Viruses Incubating in 'Pandora's Boxes' Around the World

The world can expect more SARS-like outbreaks in the near future due to evolving cultural, environmental and economic conditions that provide viruses with new opportunities to infect humans, according to an expert on infectious disease and geographic medicine at the University at Buffalo.

"There's going to be another SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) sometime; there's no doubt about it," says Richard V. Lee, M.D., professor of medicine in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and an adjunct professor of anthropology.

"There are places in the world that seem to be a Pandora's box for certain kinds of infectious disease," explains Lee, who studies the health status of geographically isolated human populations. "The way people live and interact with their environment sets the stage for letting these viruses out of their box."

Some of these places, according to Lee, include fish-farming villages in Southeast Asia -- where liver fluke infections, Japanese B encephalitis and Nipah virus threaten residents -- and agricultural communities in Africa that share boundaries with wildlife populations -- where the Ebola virus and African tick typhus are active.

Lee, who has led UB medical-student expeditions to treat people in remote areas in India, China, Kenya and Brazil, says the SARS outbreak was inevitable, as is the likelihood of outbreak for new and "old" viruses.

He calls the spread of SARS a classic example of how humans provide viruses -- in this case, the coronavirus -- with the opportunity to evolve into harmful human disease. Other examples include AIDS, which may have originated from human ingestion of infected gorilla meat, and monkey pox, which Lee says existed for decades as a primate disease in Africa before being transmitted to U.S. residents recently via Gambian giant rats and prairie dogs sold as exotic pets.

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