Solving the Mystery: Scores have died, and science still can't answer the basic questions: How do you get the virus? How do you identify it? And how do you treat it?(severe acute respiratory syndrome)

Byline: Geoffrey Cowley

No one panicked when Sui-Chu Kwan died of pneumonia last month. The 78-year-old Toronto woman had a history of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and she'd just made an arduous trip to Hong Kong. But her death was just the start of the family's problems--and the city's. Within a week of Kwan's death, her 43-year-old son suffered the same fate, and eight other family members came down with a milder form of the same strange illness--a flulike condition that progresses rapidly to pneumonia and doesn't respond to any known treatment. It wasn't the flu. It wasn't bacterial pneumonia. It wasn't even tuberculosis. So what was it? As anyone with a television now knows, it was SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome--a disease that didn't officially exist a month ago but is now scaring the entire world.

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