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The SARS Coronavirus: Rapid Diagnostics in the Limelight

¹ Emeritus Chief, Division of Infectious Disease, and, Professor of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115

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As the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic spreads, specific, rapid, and practical diagnostic tests will become increasingly critical, both for the control of the epidemic and for the management of patients. At present, outside East and Southeast Asia diagnosis depends on a clinical case definition that includes travel to, or exposure to sick contacts who have traveled to, specific parts of the world (1). As the epidemic matures, however, such epidemiologic connections will be increasingly difficult to demonstrate, and a clinical case definition that depends on this information will become increasingly irrelevant. In East and Southeast Asia, the rapidly expanding epidemic makes specific viral diagnosis even more essential. In such an evolving situation, the report by Poon et al. from Hong Kong (2), in combination with the published diagnostic technologies of that group and others in Europe and the United States (3)(4)(5), takes on extraordinary importance. Moreover, the development and publication of a rapid test for the SARS coronavirus in clinical samples, just weeks after the first reports of the emergence of the disease (6) is extraordinary.

As a historical footnote, this technologic tour de force is in extreme contrast to the diagnostic tests that led to the first descriptions of coronaviruses over 35 years ago. At that time, the most . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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