Just a few key paragraphs summarize how Vietnam was different than other SARS sites:
What she did not yet know was that they had gathered to view a miracle. She was the only survivor from among the six most critically ill patients infected when SARS broke out in the Hanoi French Hospital more than two months ago.
Her survival became a hopeful symbol for Vietnam, which on April 28 was declared by the World Health Organization to be the first nation to contain and eliminate the disease. Vietnam earned that distinction by going 20 straight days without a new case after recording 63 infections, including the six critical cases. Five people had died
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The country's success was not a miracle, said Aileen Plant, who led the fight against SARS in Vietnam for the World Health Organization. "This was real, old-fashioned infectious disease containment," she said. "It all comes back to the same thing, which is stopping infected people from infecting other people."
After a crucial meeting on March 9 with members of the World Health Organization, the government decided to fight the outbreak openly and aggressively, Ms. Plant said. A task force was formed, information gathering was centralized and virtually the whole government was mobilized to deal with the infection and its consequences.
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Vietnam's luck was that the disease had entered the country through just one infected person, an American who brought it from abroad. The Vietnamese capitalized on this luck by moving fast to confine the outbreak to the hospital.
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At the urging of Dr. Urbani and his colleagues, Vietnam closed the hospital to new patients and visitors on March 11. Most of the hospital's staff remained inside, some falling ill, others watching their colleagues sicken and die.
"The net effect probably was that they gave SARS to each other and not to the outside world," Ms. Plant said.
Ms. Men, 46, is a pediatric nurse at the hospital, but she often helped out in other wards. It is impossible to know exactly how she was infected, but on the evening of March 1, she said, she spent some time in the room of Mr. Chen, who was critically ill.
In the following days she began to suffer headaches, fever, diarrhea and exhaustion. "It was strange," she said. "A strange, overpowering tiredness."
When she checked herself into the hospital, two other nurses had already fallen ill, but, she said, "it never entered our heads that we could die."
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An immigration screening system was set up, soon to be bolstered by seven $50,000 infrared machines at airports and border crossings to detect people with high temperatures, Mr. Huang said. Hundreds of electronic thermometers are being bought for use by immigration agents.
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