Illness May Slow Trade With China
Already spawning quarantines, and causing companies to take extraordinary precautions throughout Hong Kong and other Asian countries, the severe acute respiratory syndrome virus (SARS) has already begun to impact business on America's West Coast. With over 2,200 individuals infected worldwide---over 100 of them in Canada---and sixty-two dead as a result of the disease at last count, face masks and gloves, office closings and cancelled meetings, and the establishment of back-up offices, are becoming common in Asian businesses. Its origin and vectors of transmission unknown, SARS is having an increasingly detrimental effect on travel-related industries as a growing number of US companies ban non-essential business trips to Asian countries, and is sapping already weak economies on both sides of the Pacific.