Cold Comfort
It used to be a standing joke about scientists that they could put a man on the moon but couldn't find a cure for the common cold. But despite the expenditure of significant amounts of time and money, not to mention the application of some of the best scientific minds in the business, little progress was made, and research efforts were scaled back. After all, for most of the population a cold is not a life-threatening condition - uncomfortable and unpleasant while it lasts, but really no more than a minor inconvenience.
Like designing a better mousetrap, finding a cure for the common cold was commercially attractive but deceptively hard to achieve. And there are many other potentially lucrative disease targets out there, holding out the promise of rich returns for rather less effort.
In recent weeks, however, the joke has ceased to be quite so amusing. A distant relative of the corona virus - the same virus that causes the common cold - has now been identified as the cause of a mystery condition that has caused panic around the world and has been designated by the World Health Organisation as 'a worldwide health threat'.
A couple of months ago, nobody had ever heard of SARS - now it has displaced the conflict in Iraq from the top news slot. So what makes this outbreak different from other health scare stories that emerge occasionally in the media? Why has the WHO picked out SARS as requiring one of its rare global alerts?
When all's said and done, SARS hasn't killed that many people - yet. And of an estimated 3,000 cases, there have been only just over a hundred deaths: not a particularly high fatality rate compared with other aggressive and highly infectious viruses such as Ebola.
The initial threat from SARS arose from the difficulty in identifying the virus and the inability to diagnose it quickly and accurately. But thanks to the outstanding efforts of the international science community these threats have now been largely neutralised. Close collaboration of 13 laboratories from 10 countries has now established the cause of the disease, while a German biotechnology company, Artus, has developed a high-speed test for the virus that gives results in two hours.
But modern lifestyles that allow people to cross from one side of the world to the other in hours are proving more of a challenge when it comes to containing the outbreak. At present we are having to rely on tried and trusted methods like isolation and quarantine, but the WHO is now designing a strategy to develop specific treatments and eventually vaccination.
Perhaps this is the chance the biotech sector has been waiting for to prove itself. After all, it is truly an ill wind that blows nobody any good.