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Russian scientists say SARS in same group as HIV, hepatitis
May 8, 2003
ITAR-TASS

Virus giving rise to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), also known as atypical or mystery pneumonia falls into the second group of pathogens that also embraces the HIV, hepatitis, and tick-borne (or vernal) encephalitis, a Russian scientist said Tuesday.

Dr Pyotr Deryabin, deputy director of the Moscow-based Virus Study Institute, said the SARS agent was listed as belonging to the second group of pathogens under the Russian four-group classification.

The first group includes the most dangerous infections, like the Ebola hemorrhagic fever that kills 50 percent of the people who contact it while regular flu falls into the third group under this classification.

It is unclear yet why China was destined to become the hotbed of the SARS, but science definitely knows the cases when certain viruses have been linked to certain geographic localities, Dr Deryabin said. As an instance of it, he cited a strain of the flu virus that had originated in Hong Kong.

SARS is caused by an agent falling into the group of corona viruses, but it has clear-cut individual properties at the same time. It is resistant to outward effects and has the ability to survive on different objects for two or more days. Other corona viruses get destroyed much sooner than that, Dr Deryabin said.

A somewhat different opinion came earlier in the week from Dr Arkady Ivanov, chief veterinarian of Russia's constituent territory of Tatarstan. He believes that the SARS might have been triggered by chicken flu.

"Structurally, the viruses causing atypical pneumonia and chicken flu are the same," Ivanov said.

He believes that tentative testimony to it could be seen in the recent tragic incident in the Netherlands, where chicken flu destroyed 15 million chickens and also turned out lethal for a veterinarian, who died from it.

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