The brief but fierce epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome will have
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an impact on universities for a long time to come. Scientists have changed the path of their research to find a cure, study-abroad programs set in China and Hong Kong will move elsewhere for the fall, and universities have created new campuswide systems to monitor such threats, now that administrators have learned how quickly a deadly infectious disease can sweep the globe.
In the span of a few months, the virus that causes the disease spread from exotic animals in a southern Chinese market to 29 countries, killing more than 800 people and infecting more than 8,000. The disease changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, who couldn’t travel or found themselves waiting out a quarantine period in dormitory rooms, hotels, and their own homes.
At the height of the epidemic, SARS affected virtually every facet of higher education. Hundreds, if not thousands, of faculty members and students canceled trips to SARS-affected regions and plans to conduct research, study, or return home for the summer. SARS scares occurred on at least five campuses in the United States, although no actual infections were discovered. More than 100 students in Taiwan were quarantined after coming in contact with possible SARS victims. Summer programs in China, including Hong Kong, were relocated -- to New York, North Carolina, Japan, Paris, and Princeton, N.J. In Hong Kong and elsewhere in China, where SARS hit the hardest, dozens of universities shut down for several weeks.
SARS posed both a special risk to American universities -- with students living in close quarters and many people traveling in and out of the country -- and a timely challenge. Many university administrators and health officials said SARS proved to be a good fire drill for terrorist threats.
Politics as well as public safety shaped higher education’s response to the disease. The University of California at Berkeley eased its initial ban on summer students from SARS-affected regions after the decision was criticized as “racist,” while universities in Beijing sealed their campuses only after the government revealed the true numbers of SARS cases. Singapore fined students $20 to $50 for missing temperature checks. Some institutions enacted strict measures, then eased up as the threat diminished. Berkeley let students from SARS-affected countries attend its summer session, but kept the numbers low in case anyone needed to be quarantined.
Because SARS appeared seemingly out of nowhere, it demanded a quick response by institutions where policies are formed by committees and research projects are mapped out years in advance. And it profoundly changed, if only briefly, day-to-day life on campuses:
- The Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, discovered that a command center it had set up in the wake of September 11 helped unite a highly decentralized campus.
- In Beijing, students and scholars who stayed on as the epidemic raged, either by choice or by government decree, gained a perspective on life under lockdown.
- At the University of Hong Kong, a microbiologist’s determined sleuthing led to key discoveries about the cause of SARS, and persuaded the microbiology department to shift its entire budget to SARS research.
Now, higher-education institutions are evaluating their reactions to the threat and mapping out strategies for the coming academic year. Thanks to aggressive containment policies, effective cooperation among countries, and the quick identification of the cause of the disease, SARS no longer poses the risk it did just a few months ago. But scientists believe that the long-term threat is far from over. The disease could mutate. Flu season may bring a resurgence. And a vaccine has yet to be found.
Karen Birchard, Jen Lin-Liu, and Sara Lipka contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 49, Issue 45, Page A32