Pandemic
lungs so they couldn’t provide enough oxygen to the body. At first,
Chinese authorities didn’t acknowledge the new disease. Instead, the
Guangzhou media advised people to spray vinegar into the air and onto
surfaces in their homes to kill the virus. Citizens rushed to buy vinegar,
flu medication, and antibiotics. None of these precautions helped.
By early February, SARS had sickened more than three hundred
people and killed five in Guangzhou. So on February 10, 2003, China
finally reported the new disease to WHO. Later that month, Dr. Liu
Jianlun, who had treated SARS patients in Guangzhou, went to Hong
Kong for a family wedding. He checked into Hong Kong’s Metropole
Hotel on the same day and on the same floor as the Kwans. Liu became
very ill and went to a Hong Kong hospital the next day. Liu probably
infected Kwan and dozens of other people at the hotel overnight by
coughing and sneezing in hotel hallways and elevators. Soon guests
at the hotel became ill. Health-care workers at the local hospitals who
cared for them became ill. Like Kwan, many infected people traveled
from Hong Kong and gave SARS to people along the way and at their
final destinations.
Scientists later determined that SARS started when horseshoe bats
infected animals a few months or years before the disease broke out in
Guangzhou. The bats carried evidence of a new type of coronavirus
(a family of RNA viruses named for their crown-like shape). SARS
is a distant relative of the coronavirus that causes about 15 percent
of common colds in humans. The ferret badgers and civets in the
Guangzhou market seemed to be especially vulnerable to the virus.
As the virus spread among them, it likely mutated and became easily
transmissible to humans.
In March 2003, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, then director-
general of WHO, said, “This syndrome, SARS, is now a worldwide
health threat.” Due to the volume of international air travel, cases soon
spread to the United States, Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore, and several
countries in Europe, as well as to Canada and mainland China. By the
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