In April 2003, as thousands of Chinese were infected and the dying were quarantined in squalid hospital wards, the Chinese government covered up the SARS outbreak, allowing the killer virus to spread around the world. That was hardly surprising. The first response to an epidemic is usually denial. From the perspective of a head of state, a mayor, a governor, or any ruling body, infectious disease remains among the hardest issues to manage. There is almost no calamity, save starvation or siege, that can so quickly reduce a city to panic and despair. Why should China’s mandarins behave any differently? When confronted with a new infectious disease caused by the SARS virus, they initially downplayed the danger and assumed a tacit policy of wishing the microbe back into whatever species from which it had jumped. What did they really have to go on at first?

A few hundred cases? In a nation of more than a billion? Indeed, with infectious disease outbreaks a far more common occurrence in China than in, say, the United States, it is on one level understandable how China’s minister of health, Zhang Wenkang, could have initially downplayed the threat posed by a respiratory infection thousands of miles from the capital. If it hadn’t jumped international borders, then the outbreak might have remained a minor medical curiosity.

Yet the SARS epidemic of 2003 now appears a useful blueprint of how the next pandemic might begin. As the planet struggles to deflect another imminent viral emergence, the lessons learned from SARS are more relevant than ever. Although the work of virologists, physicians, nurses, and public health officials was instrumental in beating back the virus, it is frightening to consider that if it weren’t for the courage of one...