Interview Excerpt

Interviewee details
Interviewee	Professor Peiris, Joseph Sriyal Malik
Job title during SARS	Professor of Microbiology at the University of Hong Kong and Scientific director of the HKU‐Pasteur Research Centre Honorary Consultant i/c Virology Laboratory, Department of Microbiology, Queen Mary Hospital
Appointment held at time of interview	Chair Professor and Director of the School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong
Language / Dialect	English

Summary of interview Professor Malik Peiris had been active in influenza research since the avian influenza outbreak in 1997. Having been alerted to cases of unusual severe atypical pneumonia in Guangdong from February 2003, a group of microbiologists working in the HA hospitals had established a system where samples from severe pneumonia patients were sent in duplicate to his laboratory at Queen Mary Hospital and to the Government Virus Laboratory. When the Prince of Wales Hospital outbreak occurred in March, he realized that the disease had reached Hong Kong.
He relates in detail the steps taken to identify the cause of the new disease, using the samples sent to him, including samples from the patient admitted into Kwong Wah Hospital (later acknowledged as the index patient for the Metropole Hotel outbreak) and his brother in law from whom a lung biopsy had been obtained. On 21 March, findings from his laboratory confirmed that the University of Hong Kong (HKU) team had identified the causative agent of SARS and this was announced in a press conference on 22 March. Soon afterwards, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States also confirmed the finding of coronavirus in their cases. DNA sequencing identified the virus as a novel Coronavirus (named SARS-CoV), and by 24 March, a rapid diagnostic test was developed by the HKU laboratory at Queen Mary Hospital.
Prof. Peiris discusses the special nature of SARS and why the Amoy Gardens outbreak was an unfortunate freak event that ‘no other city in the world could have handled any better’. Later efforts from the HKU team eventually identified the large game animal markets in Guangdong as the likely source of the coronavirus, and a bat Coronavirus which could have been a precursor of the SARS-CoV. He ends by sharing the lessons he had learnt from the SARS episode, as a scientist and as a person.