3 ms·
Origin of new emergent diseases–Terrestrial or cosmic?
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI'm not sure what to make of this paper. It isn't April 1st. The paper posits the hypothesis that passing through the cometary tail can deposit extra terrestrial organisms on to the planet, some of which might be the source of emergent Coronavirus and Candida fungal diseases.
- salawat 6y agoWhile I appreciate the effort in this paper, the issue that strikes me is that all this complex (and let's face it, even yeast and RNA viruses are complex compared to their raw ingredients unarranged in functional units, the most likely form for those substances to be present in a comet) would in all likelyhhod be far different from anything we found here on Earth, where these things have been put through the evolutionary meat grinder for millennia. I'd buy that our screening methods for emergent pathogens are lacking before I'd ever seriously consider extraterrestrial origin. I buy into panspermia only insofar as comets are likely contributors of the building blocks of organic life... Not the fully assembled thing.
- formalsystems 6y agoThis paper is based in delusion and fantasy. There is clearly documented evolution of the Sars-COV-2 virus within captured bats in Wuhan well before the outbreak. The theory that panspermia triggered a global pandemic has zero real evidence supporting it, and this paper does nothing to advance the theory.