SARS 

SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was an illness that first appeared in the second half of 2002 in Guangdong Province (China). The disease is now known to be caused by the SARS coronavirus (SARS CoV), a novel coronavirus. SARS was first reported in Asia (at the Vietnam French Hospital of Hanoi) in February 2003. Over the next few months, the illness spread to several countries all over the world. The origin and diffusion of SARS epidemic is studied in this example. The genome SARS-CoV was completed in April 2003 by a Canadian group of researchers. It is a 29571 base long single stranded RNA sequence. It can be obtained from Genbank database (accession number AY274119.3)