PARIS, May 22: SARS may have come from space, according to a novel theory aired by a trio of astrobiologists in Britain and India.

In a letter that appears in Saturday’s issue of the British medical weekly The Lancet, they say the idea for this came from experiments, carried out in Jan 2001, in which a tethered, sterile balloon collected samples from the stratosphere.

“Large quantities of viable micro-organisms” were captured at an altitude of 41,000 metres, they say.

Translated for the globe, that means “a ton of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily,” the trio say.

The sheer volume of this stream of micro-organisms raises the possibility that some of them will survive and a few may prove to be bacteria or viruses that are dangerous for humans, they contend.

“The annals of medical history detail many examples of plagues and pestilences that can be attributed to space incident microbes in this way.

“New epidemic diseases have a record of abrupt entrances from time to time, and equally abrupt retreats.”—AFP