SARS and the Internet.

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Abstract
Your editorial (May 15 issue)1 describes the speed and power of the Internet in communicating to the world knowledge about severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the progression of the epidemic. This access is indispensable to those of us in Taiwan, from government officials to basic researchers like me. Because of Taiwan's exclusion from the World Health Organization (WHO),2 we had to rely solely on the Internet to obtain information about SARS from the WHO's Web site and other Web sites like that of the Journal, until a team of epidemiologists from the WHO finally arrived in May to assess the damage here. Inexperienced at containing an outbreak, Taiwan was ill prepared for the task, and the deficiencies in hospital management and the health system were exposed. Since late April, a series of clusters of infections in hospitals made Taiwan's “the most rapidly growing outbreak,”3 although the pace slowed after mid-May ( Figure 1 ). It was said that no single entity can manage SARS on its own.4 For a while, Taiwan was asked by the world to do just that.

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