Thank Your Lucky SARS.

Health officials may have dealt this virus a death blow. Back in December, as northern weather was getting cold and runny noses were once again becoming the norm, health officials braced for a return of SARS. Health experts had assumed that the virus was so well ensconced in the natural world that we were unlikely to avoid a repetition of last year, when the disease jumped from animals to humans.Nobody expects this outbreak to approach the horror of last year, when SARS infected more than 8,000 people from Guangdong to Toronto and killed 774. This time Chinese health officials tracked down the source of the infection, quarantined the lab and got the word out--quickly--to hospitals.