As Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, put it, “The only tools we had to control SARS were ones we’ve had for hundreds of years.” Even so, two very different public health–based activities played critical complementary roles in stopping the SARS outbreak: first, elimination of the animal sources in China, and second, effective infection control. Once the civets and badgers were recognized as the likely source for transmitting the virus to humans, they were removed from the markets in southern Asia and people were warned not to eat or have any contact with them. This was,
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