ABSTRACT
In late 2002 and early 2003, SARS, a newly emerging respiratory illness, dominated the headlines. As Albert Camus’s narrator, Dr Rieux, points out in his novel The Plague/La Peste, concerning an afE iction of an earlier genre, ‘from that point on, it could be said the plague became the affair of us all’ ([1947]2002: 53). The new epidemic Asia faced was associated with potentially signi( cant morbidity and mortality, and presented an early major medical challenge to humankind, in the areas it most severely affected – namely, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam, as well as Canada and elsewhere. There was, and is still, no treatment to cure the disease or a vaccine to prevent it. Isolation and quarantine remain the best ways to control the disease (Chan-Yeung, 2004). The analogy of ‘war’ echoed throughout the SARS crisis – an ‘attack’ by an unknown microbe (Abraham, 2004). This war by microbes targeted the vital infrastructure of society; in this case, the public health system. The attack-rate for ‘atypical pneumonia’ in the Vietnam outbreak, the ( rst documentation of what we now call SARS, varied from 30 per cent among hospital workers with patient-contact, 6.5 per cent among patients hospitalized for other diseases at one hospital, and 6.3 per cent among close contacts of one case; the overall case fatality was 10.9 per cent (Plant, 2003). The virus ( rst hit doctors, nurses and health care workers, mowing them down like soldiers on a battle( eld. One week after the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, 33 people in the Prince of Wales (PWH) Hospital had fallen sick due to ‘atypical pneumonia’, including medical doctors and 17 medical students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong af( liated to PWH (Lee et al., 2003). Professor Clive Cockram working at PWH lamented that ‘it’s been non-stop … scary … psychologically tough and harrowing … . We felt so helpless’ (quoted in Seno and Reyes, 2004). Some health care workers, including doctors and nurses, were stigmatized and not allowed home; some did not want to go home because of the fear of infecting their families. In the areas hit hardest by SARS, people experienced a fear their forefathers had lived with constantly: the dread of death from disease.
