sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) is making the world sneeze. Even as the global health community struggles to unmask a new, deadly, organism, it faces a 21st century dilemma: the speed at which its human carriers have travelled is faster than the incubation of the disease.

There are several theories on the fever's origin. The most virulent one connects it to the Iraq war. Another suggests that in Gaungdong, the region in China where the first cases were reported, the fever could have emerged from the