The Race To Contain A Virus

The inside story of one scientist's crusade to link SARS to civets. Will it avert an epidemic?

In recorded history, no disease has jumped the species barrier to infect humans, caused an epidemic and then never threatened us again--not without the discovery of a vaccine or cure to curtail the microbe. Some diseases, such as chicken pox, gradually become endemic to man and eventually result, if we are lucky, in nothing more than a mild childhood illness. Others, such as Ebola, retreat back to whatever animal reservoir they came from, stalking humanity from their hidden lair, only occasionally lashing out to bloody a village or crash a rural hospital. But diseases do not, as a rule, just go...

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