Guangdong Province

Guangdong Province is presented as the earliest reported center of the severe respiratory disease that became known as SARS. A notification about cases there set the outbreak in motion as a global public-health concern and led into an international effort to determine the disease’s cause.

The Initial Report

In early February 2003, the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China notified the World Health Organization that 305 people in Guangdong Province had been stricken with a severe respiratory disease since November 2002; five had died. The symptoms resembled influenza, but laboratory tests had come back negative for influenza viruses. The report thus established both the scale of the known outbreak and an unresolved question about what was causing it.

From Local Cases to Global Alert

The report from Guangdong was followed by illness among a man returning from a trip to China and Hong Kong, hospitalized in Hanoi, and among workers at a Hong Kong hospital. As additional outbreaks were reported, it became clear by early March that SARS was not a new kind of flu but an entirely new disease. The World Health Organization issued a global warning to travelers about journeys to southern Asia and activated a surveillance system intended to detect further outbreaks.

The Search for a Cause

Tracking cases mattered because SARS was already understood to spread from person to person, making quarantine a possible means of limiting transmission. Identifying its cause was also essential to developing tests and, potentially, a vaccine. The World Health Organization therefore organized eleven laboratories from countries and territories around the world into a collaborative research project. Through daily teleconferences, shared online photographs and test results, and exchanges of virus samples, the laboratories worked in parallel to test possible causes. By April 16, roughly a month after the collaboration began, they were confident that a coronavirus caused SARS.

Significance

Guangdong Province’s place in the account is specific but consequential: it is where the first reported cluster and the initial public-health notification originated. The episode then widens from a regional outbreak to a global warning and an international research effort. The book’s emphasis is not on assigning the discovery to one person or laboratory, but on how a shared investigation established what the disease was and what caused it.