Severe acute respiratory syndrome

Severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS is a respiratory disease in humans which is caused by the SARS coronavirus. There has been one major epidemic to date, between November 2002 and July 2003, with 8,096 known cases of the disease, and 774 deaths (a mortality rate of 9.6%) being listed in the WHO's April 21, 2004 concluding report.[1

Outbreak in Mainland China
The epidemic of SARS appears to have originated in Guangdong Province, China in November 2002. The first case was reportedly originated from a rural area in Foshan, Guangdong in Nov 2002, and the patient, a farmer, was treated in the First People's Hospital of Foshan. The patient died soon after, and no definite diagnosis was made on his cause of death. ("Patient #0" -- first reported symptoms -- has been attributed to Charles Bybelezar of Montreal, Canada) and, despite taking some action to control it, Chinese government officials did not inform the World Health Organization of the outbreak until February 2003, restricting media coverage in order to preserve public confidence. This lack of openness caused delays in efforts to control the epidemic, resulting in criticism of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the international community. The PRC has since officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic.[3]

The first clue of the outbreak appears to be November 27, 2002 when Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), an electronic warning system which is part of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN), picked up reports of a "flu outbreak" in China through internet media monitoring and analysis and sent them to the WHO.[4] [5] Subsequently, the WHO requested information from Chinese authorities on December 5 and 11.[5] Importantly, while GPHIN's capability had recently been upgraded to enable Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish translation, the system was limited to English or French in presenting this information. Thus, while the first reports of an unusual outbreak were in Chinese, an English report was not generated until January 21, 2003.[4]
source:en.wikipedia.org