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http://www.forbes.com/home/2003/04/10/cx_mh_0410sars.html

"Instead of having all the laboratories work independently and highly competitively, all of them are sharing information with each other," says Dr. Stephen M. Ostroff, deputy director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control. Photographs and genetic data that were once constrained by the speed of FedEx (nyse: FDX - news - people ) or DHL can now be shared electronically and instantaneously.

WHO spokesman Dick Thompson says the Web sites were set up internally by the organization to give scientists a place to share data that were not ready for prime time. "People need room to chat in private," Thompson says. These secure Web sites have played a pivotal role in beginning to understand the coronavirus that causes SARS, and in beginning to identify which patients are at the highest risk of dying from the pneumonia. There are no private-sector companies involved in setting up the Web sites.

The virus' genetic code was uncovered with one of the most common tests in biology, the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. The test literally untwists the virus' genetic material, allowing researchers to create a gene-by-gene sequence of it. It helped enormously, Ostroff says, that researchers in the U.S. and Hong Kong were able to compare and contrast their results with those in Germany and France. Once a rough picture of the virus' genes was put together, it served as a foundation for diagnostics that can tell whether patients have SARS rather than garden-variety viral pneumonia. The PCR sequence has been made publicly available.

Trading data on the Web has also allowed researchers to figure out which patients are most at risk from the disease. Using the secure Web sites, clinicians have been able to trade photographs and chest X-rays instantly, helping them to better understand how SARS patients deteriorate. Comparing one patient to another has led them to conclude that people over 40 years old, and those with preexisting heart conditions, are most likely to succumb to the virus.

These are only first steps. More than 2,600 people worldwide have developed SARS, and between 3% and 4% of them have died. This is much worse than the death rate in the U.S. for influenza, which infects 25 million people annually and kills 30,000.

A bright note: Of the 154 possible SARS victims in the U.S., none has died, making the death rate in America zero percent. Why would it be so low? Ostroff says it may be because American doctors are counting milder cases, which appear more like a bad flu and less like pneumonia. Previously, researchers could only point out people who suffered from the worst and most lethal form of the disease. "If true mortality is around 1%," Ostroff says, "then it would not be surprising we've had no deaths."

That is cold comfort in the face of a frightening and little-understood infection. But at least researchers around the world are able to pool their resources in ways that were not possible with previous disease outbreaks.

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