I suspect the whole urban high rise world has the same problem --- except possibly for the presence / absence of floor drains.
I read a report yesterday on the Hong Kong Health Department SARS site about the Amoy Gardens outbreak that talked in great detail about "waste stacks" [which in those buildings go straight down] and floor drains [which are in every bathroom which have traps that tend to dry out if no effort is made to pour in a little water every few days -- sinks toilets and showers tend to get filled often enough through normal usage patterns.] I don't have the URL and am on a slower than slow dial up. Look for it uner "news" under the main site.
The picture painted was fairly clear. Human waste failing several stories would create a nasty aerosol that could easily pass through the untended [empty] floor drain traps and onto bathroom floors and elsewhere in these apartments.
The alpha case for the cluster apparently was a visitor who had severe intestinal symptonsfrom his SARS infection. Viral loads in his waste -- who knows, but clearly enough to be transmissable. The initial outbreak of Amoy Gardens infections tended to cluster in vertical planes with apartments 7 and 8 on each floor being the hot spots for infection. From there the infections spread out into the rest of the complex with about a three day lag.
I am not a plumber, but the message is that any dry trap could be serious problem and any dry trap in a high rise is a problem waiting to happen. If not from SARS, then from whatever disease someone on the floor above has cooking in their intestinal tract.