Indeed, preliminary studies of early SARS victims here in Guangdong have found that an unusually high percentage were in the catering profession — a tantalizing clue, perhaps, to how a germ that genetically most resembles chicken and rodent viruses has gained the ability to infect thousands of humans.
One of the earliest cases, last December, was a seller of snakes and birds here who died at Shunde's First People's Hospital of severe pneumonia. His wife and a several members of the hospital staff contracted it as well, setting off an outbreak that now sounds eerily familiar.
In Singapore, with its aggressive system of identifying and isolating SARS patients, no health care worker has been infected for over three weeks. But in Hong Kong, 2 to 10 doctors and nurses are falling ill each day, in part, health officials there say, because doctors are still not identifying them as SARS victims early enough and are admitting them to ordinary wards.