For anyone who lived and worked in Asia during SARS earlier this decade, here is the lesson learned about disease outbreaks:

No one wants to be Chicken Little, wailing against the falling sky. But the folks who ignored the warnings, and played down the emerging impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, put their businesses and the safety of their staff at risk. Roughly 8,000 people caught the disease, about 10% of them died and a large number of survivors were maimed by frantic, emergency treatments. The regional economy,...