Bugs on a Plane
CASE STUDY: SARS
Kwan Sui-chu, a seventy-eight-year-old Canadian grandmother, didn’t
know that she was carrying the first new disease of the twenty-first
century when she flew from Hong Kong back home to Toronto,
Ontario, in February 2003. Although she felt well, a dangerous virus
lurked deep within her lungs. Kwan and her husband had spent two
weeks visiting their sons in Hong Kong. They had checked into the
Metropole Hotel for one night on February 21 before their flight home.
The reasonably priced hotel drew many international tourists.
Back in Toronto, Kwan returned to the apartment she shared with
family members. Two days later, she developed a high fever, muscle
aches, and a cough. Kwan’s doctor prescribed rest and antibiotics, but
that didn’t help. Kwan died at home a few days later of what her doctor
said was a heart attack. But Kwan died of severe acute respiratory
syndrome, a disease spread by coughing, sneezing, and touching
contaminated surfaces. Kwan infected five other family members
before the new disease even had a name.
However, SARS didn’t start with Kwan. The first cases of the
mysterious new illness broke out among people who had purchased
wildlife from a wet market in Guangzhou, a city of more than thirteen
million people in China’s Guangdong Province. Vendors at these
markets sold a huge variety of live wildlife for food and butchered it
for customers on the spot (thus the name
wet market
). Cages crammed
with bats, snakes, foxes, rats, raccoon dogs, ferret badgers, and civets
were stacked on top of one another. The animals at the market were
unlikely to be near one another in the wild. But in the wet market they
were. This allowed pathogens such as the SARS virus to pass from
animal to animal and from them to people.
Dozens of cases of the disease broke out in Guangzhou during
November and December 2002 and into January 2003. The still-
unnamed disease caused headaches, high fever, severe coughing, and
bloody sputum from the lungs. At its worst, the disease damaged the
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