 HKU’s Malik Peiris on SARS and Its Lessons
Over the years, infectious illnesses from seasonal flu viruses to
deadly pandemics have emerged from the depths of China to spread
throughout the world. In late 1997, it was the avian flu that jumped
from chickens to humans, infecting 18 people, killing 6, and running
through the newspapers for weeks on end. In the spring of 2003, it was
the mutant coronavirus known as SARS—for severe acute respiratory
syndrome—that infected more than 8,000 individuals in 30 countries and
killed over 700 of them. But SARS, despite the nightmares it engendered,
was quickly controlled and then vanquished by a massive public-health
response spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO) and
representing an unprecedented collaboration of research laboratories
worldwide.
On the front lines of this effort was a collaboration of virus
hunters working out of the University of Hong Kong and Queen Mary’s
Hospital, led by Malik Peiris, who managed within weeks to culture the
SARS virus from victims of the infection and then promptly identify it.
As a result of this team effort, Peiris’s initial report, published on
April 19, 2003 in the Lancet ("Coronavirus
as a possible cause of severe acute respiratory syndrome," 361[9366]:
1319-25, 2003), has racked up more than 300 citations in just a
year and a half, recently ranking among the hottest papers...
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 Material Gain: China Advances in Scientific Output and Impact
Since
1981, the People’s Republic of China has sharply increased its output of
scientific papers, according to a new Science Watch survey of that nation’s
research. Figures also indicate that the citation impact of research from China
is trending upward in key fields, and that over the last decade China-based
authors have been increasingly represented in an elite selection of each year’s
most highly cited papers...
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