While the identification and control of the animal reservoir is an essential component of this project, it is also important to make use of the past epidemic experience to design strategies to control future human epidemics. The goal is disease elimination, i.e., zero incidence, since low-level transmission or endemicity in humans would lead to an unacceptable risk of sudden worldwide epidemics.

Besides re-emergence from the animal reservoir, the virus could reappear in human populations through other mechanisms such as environmental contamination by long-time virus excretors, or laboratory accident as recently happened in Singapore. It has been long feared that, if a SARS epidemic were to occur simultaneously with a flu epidemic, strict measures controls required by the management of the SARS epidemic would not be applicable to all patients presenting with respiratory symptoms, resulting in failure of the control intervention. Urgent action is therefore required, and this work programme, re-analysing data from the 2003 epidemic in China, and studying prospectively cohorts of convalescent patients, addresses all these issues. The aim is to provide epidemiological data on which international recommendations to prevent or control future epidemics in China and elsewhere can be based.

The work programme is divided into five work packages, WP6 to WP11: