ABSTRACT
This book was occasioned by the 2002/2003 international SARS outbreak, particularly the actions taken by WHO in relation to Toronto, Canada. It was the fi rst time since the 1918 infl uenza pandemic that a city in Canada had faced the social, political, economic, and health repercussions of an outbreak of a previously unknown, highly infectious disease that left many of those who suffered it dead. The contrast between our local, everyday experience and SARS as an event organized extralocally across differing levels of government from city to province to nation to WHO struck us forcefully. Given that WHO was not previously a highly visible social actor centrally involved in Canadian public health, we wondered by what authority it had acted. Over the course of our research we came to understand that WHO was granted the power to issue travel advisories and global alerts during an epidemic/outbreak by the World Health Assembly in May 2003 after these powers had already been applied to Beijing, Shanxi Province, and Toronto during the SARS outbreak. Our point of entry to this book thus led from the SARS outbreak in Toronto to questions of juridical right and world order.
