Check out Carl Zimmer’s latest NY Times article. Very interesting stuff . . .
Viruses have a knack for ambush. Time and again, they have struck our species without warning, producing new diseases. H.I.V. burst on the scene in the early 1980s, and it took years for scientists to figure out that it had evolved from a chimpanzee virus in the early 1900s. In 2003, a previously unknown bat virus in China began to cause SARS in humans. Today we are in the midst of yet another ambush, as a new virus called MERS is infecting people, mostly in in Saudi Arabia. Scientists have yet to definitively pin down its origin, although preliminary evidence points to another species of bat.
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