"Ebola transmits like wildfire in hospitals and among family members for two or three transmissions and then loses the ability to infect people," Brown said. "It loses the ability to spread and keep its virulence, and burns out on its own."
The WHO has said the SARS virus, which is a newly discovered member of the coronavirus family, is the cause of SARS. But the agency and other scientists agree that more work needs to be done to be certain. Scientists know that other coronaviruses have a high rate of mutation and so they say that it is far too soon to know whether the SARS virus will change to cause milder, or even more severe, illness, or become a seasonal disease, like influenza and other coronaviruses.
The SARS virus does not closely resemble other known human and animal coronaviruses, and scientists do not know its origins.
Brown said that studying animals in China to trace SARS back to its possible origin would be a formidable task. Countless animals would have to be swabbed for viruses, which would then have to be cultured, sequenced and compared.
And since it is also possible that SARS came from a mutated human coronavirus, researchers would have to search for human viruses as well.
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