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Season 1 · Episode 1

A Sky Full of SARS

34:46Updated November 10, 2026

How does coffee connect to the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup? Tag along as we talk about Mediterranean conquests, coffee houses, dancing goats, civets, bats, and the deadly Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus outbreak in China.

0:0034:46
Transcript

In this episode

Jump to
  1. Iced Coffee and the Argument That Starts It
  2. A Berry from Ethiopia
  3. The Most Expensive Coffee in the World
  4. From a Market in Guangdong
  5. The Animal in the Cage
  6. A Crown, a Key, and a Lock
  7. A Sky Full of SARS
  8. Corrections to the audio
Black and white transmission electron micrograph showing several round coronavirus particles with a fringe of surface spike proteins

Coronavirus

© Fred Murphy, CDC, public domain
An Asian palm civet lying inside a wire cage, looking toward the camera

Asian palm civet

© surtr (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Iced Coffee and the Argument That Starts It#

One of us refuses to drink iced coffee. Not “tried it and disliked it,” but flatly will not, on principle, having never once let a cold cup near his mouth. The other finds this indefensible. You can write off a food you have never tasted in some cases, the argument goes, but coffee is not one of those things; you have to actually try it before you get an opinion. We have never settled it, which is fine, because the fight was never really about coffee. It was about where a cup of coffee can take you. Follow this one far enough and it runs from a goat in the Ethiopian highlands to the most expensive coffee on earth, to a small caged animal in an Asian market, and from there into the first new plague of the twenty-first century. Here is how a luxury beverage and a deadly virus end up sharing the same animal.

A Berry from Ethiopia#

No one knows exactly where coffee began, but the plant is native to the highland forests of Ethiopia, and the legend everyone tells starts there. A goatherd named Kaldi, the story goes, noticed his goats growing strangely lively after eating the bright cherries of a certain shrub, tried the berries himself, and felt the same lift. The tale is almost certainly embroidered, but the Ethiopian origin is not: nearly every cultivated arabica plant traces back to those forests. What is solid history is what happened next. By the fifteenth century coffee was being cultivated and traded across the Red Sea in Yemen, brewed in Sufi communities to keep worshippers awake through long religious rituals, and within a hundred years it had spread through Egypt, Persia, Syria, and the Ottoman world, served in public houses called qahveh khaneh.

Europe got its first real taste through trade with the Ottomans, and the first European coffeehouses opened in Venice around 1645. The drink moved north, and the colonial powers, wanting supplies of their own, went looking for live plants. The Dutch got there first, obtaining seeds in the Yemeni port of Mocha and planting them on Java, the island that lent coffee one of its nicknames. From there cuttings traveled to the Caribbean, to Vietnam, and across the Americas, until coffee grew on nearly every tropical shore. The coffeehouse became its own institution along the way, a place to argue, trade gossip, and read the news. One London coffeehouse run by a man named Edward Lloyd became such a dependable spot for shipping talk that it grew, in time, into the insurance market still known as Lloyd’s of London. Coffee, in other words, was always less a drink than a network.

The Most Expensive Coffee in the World#

Goats are not the only animals that go for coffee cherries, and one of them produces the strangest luxury in the trade. The Asian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, is a small nocturnal mammal of tropical Asia, about the size of a house cat with a face somewhere between a cat and a young bear. Left to itself, it climbs through coffee plantations at night and eats only the ripest cherries. The beans pass through its gut, where digestive enzymes and bacteria break down some of their proteins and blunt the coffee’s bitterness, and come out the other end largely intact, bundled in droppings that, we are sorry to report, look a great deal like a candy bar studded with beans. Collected, cleaned, and roasted, those beans become kopi luwak, from the Indonesian words for coffee and for the civet, and a single pound of it can sell for more than a hundred dollars.

For a while this was good news for the civet. Then the money got ahead of the animal. Producers began trapping civets, packing them into cages, and force-feeding them whatever cherries came to hand, which ruined the very thing that made the coffee special, the animal’s wild instinct for the perfect berry. The caged trade was cruel and it was sloppy. Civets were also sold in the live-animal markets of southern China, where they sat stacked among other wild species in close, stressful, unsanitary quarters. Hold that picture of the caged civet in the crowded market. It is where the second half of this story begins.

From a Market in Guangdong#

In November 2002, in Guangdong province in southern China, a patient turned up at a hospital in Foshan with a severe atypical pneumonia, the kind not caused by the usual bacterial suspects. Within a few months there were hundreds of cases and dozens of deaths across the province’s hospitals, many of them among the nurses and doctors doing the treating; one early spreader, a seafood seller admitted to a Guangzhou hospital, infected some thirty staff by himself. Chinese authorities were slow to share what was happening, delaying reports to the World Health Organization and withholding details from the rest of the country, a silence that almost certainly cost lives and let the outbreak build.

It went global through a single hotel floor. In February 2003 a Guangdong doctor named Liu Jianlun, who had been treating these patients and was feeling unwell, traveled to Hong Kong for a family wedding and checked into room 911 of the Metropole Hotel. In one night he infected other guests on the ninth floor, and they carried the disease out into the world before he was hospitalized and died. The earliest and most severe outbreaks, in Hong Kong, Toronto, Hanoi and Singapore, trace back to that one floor. An elderly woman flew home to Toronto and seeded a Canadian cluster that would put thousands into quarantine; a young Singaporean named Esther Mok, also a Metropole guest, survived but started the outbreak there; and a Chinese American businessman named Johnny Chen fell ill after flying to Hanoi and was admitted to the French Hospital, where the staff began dropping one after another.

The doctor who examined Chen was Carlo Urbani, an Italian infectious disease specialist working for the WHO. He recognized within days that this was something new and dangerously contagious, alerted the WHO, and pressed the Vietnamese authorities to isolate patients and screen travelers, buying the world precious time. Then he boarded a flight to a conference in Bangkok, fell ill somewhere over the journey, and was hospitalized as soon as he landed. He died on March 29, 2003. The disease he had flagged for the world would be named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS. Before it was contained that summer, it reached more than 8,000 people in 29 countries and regions and killed 774, a fatality rate of roughly one in ten.

The Animal in the Cage#

When investigators went looking for where the virus had come from, they went back to the markets. In the spring of 2003, samples taken from masked palm civets sold as food in Guangdong turned up coronaviruses almost identical to the one making people sick. The masked palm civet is not the same animal as the coffee-making Asian palm civet, but it is a close cousin in the same family, roughly the way humans are related to the other great apes. Authorities responded by culling more than a thousand civets in Guangdong in early 2004 and restricting their trade, and for a time the civet looked like the source.

The fuller picture turned out to sit one step further back. The civet strains did not carry enough genetic variety to be the original reservoir; they looked like a virus that had only recently arrived from somewhere else. That somewhere was bats. Cave-dwelling horseshoe bats were found to harbor a rich diversity of closely related SARS-like coronaviruses, and the consensus that emerged is that the virus lived quietly in bats, spilled into civets, and there, in the amplifying crush of the market, picked up the changes that let it infect and pass between people. The animal that bridged bat and human was a civet, the same sort of creature prized, some two thousand miles away, for making the world’s most expensive cup of coffee.

A Crown, a Key, and a Lock#

SARS is caused by a coronavirus, and the name is really a description. Studded across the surface of each viral particle, each virion, are spike proteins that stand out like the points of a crown or the rays of a halo. Those spikes are not decoration; they are the key. To get into a human cell the spike has to fit a specific lock on the cell’s surface, a receptor called ACE2, short for angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, which the body normally uses to help regulate blood pressure. The fit between that viral key and that human lock is the whole game: change the spike too much and it no longer turns the lock, which is exactly the barrier the bat and civet versions had to clear before they could open human cells.

The rest of the virus is built for travel. It is an enveloped virus, wrapped in a fatty membrane much like the one around our own cells, a trait shared by many of the viruses that spread well in coughs and sneezes. Its genome is a single strand of RNA only about thirty thousand letters long, a rounding error next to the three billion in ours, and it mutates at a moderate clip, enough now and then to change the shape of a protein or what that protein can grab. Coronaviruses are not exotic; milder ones cause a good share of ordinary colds. There was never a cure for SARS, only supportive care to keep patients breathing while their bodies fought it off, which is why the outbreak was beaten not in a laboratory but in the field, through quarantine, isolation, and the unglamorous machinery of public health.

A Sky Full of SARS#

What made SARS new was not really the virus. It was the speed. Coffee took centuries to cross from Ethiopia to the Americas, carried by ship a few months at a time. SARS crossed the same oceans in a day, because a sick traveler who could not tell a new plague from a bad cold could carry it from a hotel in Hong Kong to Hanoi, Toronto, and Singapore before the fever even set in. A disease that once would have burned itself out in one isolated place now boarded a plane. A sky full of SARS.

So the thread holds, all the way back to a petty argument about iced coffee. A luxury brewed from the droppings of one civet and a virus carried to us by another are not two stories but one, joined at a cage in a crowded market. The next time someone offers you the most expensive coffee in the world, you will at least know the whole strange family it comes from. We still cannot agree on iced coffee. But that, it turns out, was never really the point.

Corrections to the audio#

The episode audio states several things that are wrong. The corrections:

  • At 3:47, Batavia (now Jakarta) is on Java, so coffee did not reach Java after Batavia; the Dutch first grew coffee on Java in the 1690s, from seeds obtained in Mocha (Cities, American Scientist PDF).
  • At 16:17, kopi luwak sells for over a hundred dollars a pound, not a cup (Animal Diversity Web, American Scientist PDF).
  • At 19:04, Guangdong had reported 792 cases and 31 deaths by February 28, 2003, not over 800 cases (WHO).
  • At 19:42, Liu Jianlun was admitted to Kwong Wah Hospital on February 22, 2003, and died on March 4, not admitted on March 1 (WHO).
  • At 21:34, Esther Mok stayed at the Metropole Hotel from February 21 to 25; March 1 is when she was admitted to a hospital in Singapore, not when she traveled (WHO).
  • At 21:40, Singapore had 238 probable cases and 33 deaths, not about 340 cases (WHO).
  • At 22:56, the outbreak totaled 8,096 probable cases in 29 countries and areas, with 774 deaths, not more than 8,200 people in 17 countries (WHO).
  • At 25:35, pneumonia is an infection of one or both lungs that fills the air sacs with fluid or pus, not simply liquid in the lungs (NHLBI).

Hosts

Sources and Credits
  1. CreditWritten and performed by Dr. Dustin Edwards and Dr. Faith Cox (another site)
  2. MusicGeorge Street Shuffle by Kevin MacLeod (another site)incompetech.comCC BY 4.0
  3. ImageCoronavirus (transmission electron micrograph) (another site)Fred MurphyCDCPublic domain
  4. ImageAsian palm civet (civet cat) in cage (another site)surtrWikimedia CommonsCC BY-SA 2.0
  5. referenceSummary of probable SARS cases with onset of illness from 1 November 2002 to 31 July 2003 (another site)World Health OrganizationFinal totals: 8,096 probable cases and 774 deaths worldwide (case fatality ratio 9.6%).
  6. referenceUpdate 95 - SARS: Chronology of a serial killer (another site)World Health OrganizationOfficial WHO timeline of the 2003 SARS outbreak.
  7. referenceSARS Pandemic: How the Virus Spread Around the World in 2003 (another site)HISTORYLiu Jianlun in Room 911; superspreaders; 8,096 cases in 26 countries, 774 deaths.
  8. referenceIsolation and Characterization of Viruses Related to the SARS Coronavirus from Animals in Southern China (another site)Science 302:276-278 (Guan et al., 2003)SARS-like viruses were isolated from Himalayan palm civets in a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.
  9. referenceBats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses (another site)Science 310:676-679 (Li et al., 2005)Bats are a natural host of coronaviruses closely related to SARS-CoV, with greater genetic variation than the civet and human isolates.
  10. referenceIsolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor (another site)Nature 503:535-538 (Ge et al., 2013)A live SARS-like coronavirus from Yunnan horseshoe bats uses the ACE2 receptor.
  11. referenceStructural Analysis of Major Species Barriers between Humans and Palm Civets for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Infections (another site)Journal of Virology 82(14):6984-6991 (Li, 2008)SARS-CoV is thought to have passed from palm civets to humans; the receptor-binding domain of the viral spike binds the host receptor ACE2, and the fit between spike and ACE2 is the main species barrier.
  12. referenceSelection of discriminant markers for authentication of Asian palm civet coffee (Kopi Luwak) (another site)PubMed (J. Agric. Food Chem.)Kopi luwak is made from coffee berries eaten by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus); the world's most expensive coffee.
  13. referenceParadoxurus hermaphroditus (Asian palm civet) (another site)Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of ZoologyThe Asian palm civet belongs to the civet family Viverridae and is linked to kopi luwak through the coffee cherries it eats and passes.
  14. referenceHistory of Coffee (another site)National Coffee AssociationLegend of the goat herder Kaldi; coffee grown in Yemen by the 15th century; reached Venice in 1615.
  15. referenceCoffee and commerce 1652-1811 (another site)Lloyd'sEdward Lloyd's Tower Street coffee house, first mentioned in 1688, specialised in shipping information and was popular with ship owners, who bought insurance there; it grew into Lloyd's of London.
  16. referenceSARS: breaking the chains of transmission (another site)World Health OrganizationSARS is the first severe and easily transmissible new disease to emerge in the 21st century; the earliest and most severe outbreaks, in Toronto, Hong Kong, Viet Nam and Singapore, were all seeded by visitors to the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel.
  17. referenceEpidemiology and cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Guangdong, People's Republic of China, in February, 2003 (another site)Lancet 362(9393):1353-1358 (Zhong et al., 2003)Guangzhou's index community case, a 46-year-old seafood merchant admitted on January 31, 2003, stayed in hospital 18 hours and infected more than 30 hospital staff.
  18. referenceSevere Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Singapore: Clinical Features of Index Patient and Initial Contacts (another site)Emerging Infectious Diseases 9(6) (Hsu et al., 2003)Singapore's index patient recovered.
  19. reference91 cases traced to one woman (another site)The StarEsther Mok, one of three Singaporean women who stayed at the Metropole Hotel, started Singapore's chain of transmission.
  20. referenceIn memoriam: Carlo Urbani (another site)Médecins Sans FrontièresUrbani first examined Johnny Chen, a Chinese-American businessman, on February 28, 2003, at Hanoi's Vietnam-France Hospital, and is credited as the first WHO officer to identify SARS.
  21. referenceWHO commemorates the 20th anniversary of the death of Dr Carlo Urbani (another site)World Health OrganizationUrbani, born in Italy, convinced Vietnamese health authorities to isolate suspected cases and screen travelers.
  22. referenceWHO remembers Dr Carlo Urbani as a hero who fought SARS (another site)World Health OrganizationUrbani developed symptoms of SARS on a flight to Bangkok on March 11, 2003, and died on March 29.
  23. referenceAntibodies to SARS coronavirus in civets (another site)Emerging Infectious Diseases 10(12) (Tu et al., 2004)After SARS-CoV was found in market civets, Guangdong launched a campaign to cull all civets in the province; more than a thousand were culled in January 2004.
  24. referenceSARS case in China confirmed (another site)CIDRAP, University of Minnesota (January 5, 2004)China ordered the killing of civets in all of Guangdong's wildlife markets, and all wildlife markets in the province were ordered to close.
  25. referenceSARS coronavirus Tor2, complete genome (NC_004718) (another site)NCBI NucleotideThe SARS coronavirus genome is single-stranded RNA, 29,751 nucleotides long.
  26. referenceThe Rise of Coffee (another site)American Scientist 96(2):138-145 (Vega, 2008)Arabica is endemic to the highlands of Ethiopia, southeastern Sudan and northern Kenya; Sufis in Yemen used coffee by 1450; the first European coffeehouses opened in Venice in 1645; the Dutch grew coffee on Java from seeds obtained in Mocha, and coffee's spread worldwide came from those Java plants.
  27. referenceUnraveling the complexities of caffeine: metabolism, genetics, evolution, and health (another site)Hereditas 163:36 (Liu and Xu, 2026)Coffee brewing emerged in Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century among Sufi practitioners, who used it to sustain concentration during long religious rituals.
  28. referenceMetagenomic and metabolomic analyses of fecal samples from civet-digested coffee in Vietnam (another site)PeerJ 14:e21262 (Tran et al., 2026)In the civet's gut, digestive enzymes and microbes break down the beans' proteins; civet-digested beans are less acidic and less bitter.
  29. referenceHuman Coronavirus Types (another site)CDCThe common human coronaviruses 229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1 usually cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory illnesses, like the common cold.
  30. referenceFrom gene to protein: experimental and clinical studies of ACE2 in blood pressure control and arterial hypertension (another site)Frontiers in Physiology 5:227 (Patel et al., 2014)Within the renin-angiotensin system, ACE2 counterbalances the classic arm by degrading the vasoconstrictor angiotensin II and generating the vasodilator angiotensin 1-7; ACE2 deficiency contributes to hypertension.
  31. referenceSevere Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) (another site)World Health OrganizationNo treatment or cure was available when SARS emerged; in 10-20% of cases the illness was severe enough to require intubation and mechanical ventilation.
  32. referencePneumonia: What Is Pneumonia? (another site)National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NIHPneumonia is an infection that affects one or both lungs and causes the air sacs to fill up with fluid or pus.
  33. referenceJakarta: A city of cities (another site)Cities 106:102868 (Martinez and Masron, 2020)Jakarta is situated on the northwest coast of Java.
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