Introduction

The passage of time has healed some of the wounds inflicted by the deadly epidemic. The economy in Hong Kong and most of Asia has picked up and the communities have gone back to their daily activities. The masks and the gloves are off and people have gone back to their old habits with respect to personal hygiene and work practices. After all, old habits die hard.

However, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) continues to lurk in the background and still causes a diagnostic dilemma. By the end of 2003/early 2004 (at the time of writing this chapter), there were five sporadic cases of SARS, two involving laboratory researchers and three outside the laboratory in Guangdong Province in China. Although the two laboratory cases (Taiwan, Singapore) were readily identified, the cases in Guangdong were definitively verified more than a week after the suspicion was raised. The clinical parameters, laboratory tests and history of contact in this patient were initially nebulous, highlighting the difficulty in the early diagnosis of this potentially fatal disease. Despite detailed contact, tracing the source of the infection was not definitively traced and it has been postulated that the source might have been civet cats as unpublished reports from Guangdong and Hong Kong have found similarities in the genetic sequences of the virus in the SARS patient and civet cats, which is a gourmet delicacy in southern China.