Doing Battle with the Bug

Shared bathrooms. Damp floors. Dirty bedding. The complaints from the residents of the Lady MacLehose Holiday Village and other decrepit resort settlements in Hong Kong are the sorts of gripes you would expect from unhappy campers. This time, though, the more than 240 occupants of these remote settlements are the evacuated residents of Block E of Amoy Gardens, a crowded Hong Kong housing estate that has become the most virulent breeding ground yet for the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak. In barely a week more than 250 residents of Amoy Gardens contracted the potentially deadly virusnearly half of them are...