China officially apologized for early slowness in dealing with the SARS epidemic.The viral outbreak was subsequently genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Xiyang Yi Ethnic Township, Yunnan.The outbreak first came to the attention of the international medical community on 27 November 2002, when Canadas Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), an electronic warning system that is part of the World Health Organizations Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), picked up reports of a "flu outbreak" in China through Internet media monitoring and analysis and sent them to the WHO. While GPHINs 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 21 January 2003. The first super-spreader was admitted to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou on 31 January, which soon spread the disease to nearby hospitals.In early April 2003, after a prominent physician, Jiang Yanyong, pushed to report the danger to China, there appeared to be a change in official policy when SARS began to receive a much greater prominence in the official media. Some have directly attributed this to the death of an American teacher, James Earl Salisbury, in Hong Kong. It was around this same time that Jiang Yanyong made accusations regarding the undercounting of cases in Beijing military hospitals.
The WHO officially removed Toronto from its list of infected areas by the end of June 2003.The official response by the Ontario provincial government and Canadian federal government has been widely criticized in the years following the outbreak. Brian Schwartz, vice-chair of Ontarios SARS Scientific Advisory Committee, described public health officials preparedness and emergency response at the time of the outbreak as "very, very basic and minimal at best". Critics of the response often cite poorly outlined and enforced protocol for protecting healthcare workers and identifying infected patients as a major contributing factor to the continued spread of the virus. The atmosphere of fear and uncertainty surrounding the outbreak resulted in staffing issues in area hospitals when healthcare workers elected to resign rather than risk exposure to SARS. Identification of virus
In late February 2003, Italian doctor Carlo Urbani was called into The French Hospital of Hanoi to look at Johnny Chen, an American businessman who had fallen ill with what doctors thought was a bad case of influenza. Urbani realized that Chens ailment was probably a new and highly contagious disease. He immediately notified the WHO. He also persuaded the Vietnamese Health Ministry to begin isolating patients and screening travelers, thus slowing the early pace of the epidemic. He subsequently contracted the disease himself, and died in March 2003.The CDC and Canadas National Microbiology Laboratory identified the SARS genome in April 2003. Scientists at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands demonstrated that the SARS coronavirus fulfilled Kochs postulates thereby suggesting it as the causative agent.