The sudden outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 was a dramatic event. It briefly paralyzed several countries in Asia. The economic impact was considerable and illustrated how devastating epidemics can be in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world.

“SARS was the watershed for public realization that these have a huge economic cost,” says Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of Wildlife Trust, a New York-based organization that works to promote biodiversity in more than 20 countries. Daszak oversees a program that works with corporations to assess their vulnerability to infectious diseases based on past cases and how and where they spread.

SARS was linked to more than 8,000 cases -- and 900 deaths -- between November 2002 and July 2003 across 26 countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). More than 7,000 cases were located in mainland China and Hong Kong.

The earliest cases are thought to have emerged in mid-November 2002 in the Chinese province of Guangdong.

The first recorded case outside China occurred in February 2003, when a medical doctor who had treated patients there spent a single night in a hotel in Hong Kong and transmitted it to at least 16 other guests and visitors, all linked to the same hotel floor. They carried the virus with them as they entered local hospitals or traveled to Singapore, Toronto, or Vietnam.

The virus was short-lived -- the WHO raised the alarm on SARS in March and by June had lifted a travel warning to affected countries -- but, apart from the direct costs of intensive medical care and control interventions, it caused widespread social disruption and economic losses.

People in Hong Kong, Singapore, Toronto, Vietnam, and Guangdong Province in China avoided public places, travel, and human contact. Schools, hospitals, and some borders were closed, and thousands of people were placed in quarantine.