The brief but serious SARS pandemic of 2003 showed how crisis can revive a moribund international transparency policy. The response to this new and sometimes fatal disease also provided an intriguing glimpse into the future by suggesting how communication technologies can transform the way transparency systems work.

As noted earlier, emails, cell phone calls, and Internet chatroom messages from health-care workers and villagers in China's Guangdong Province in late 2002 and early 2003 first spread theword that peoplewere falling ill from a mysterious respiratory illness. As the Chinese government continued to deny the existence of such an illness, private electronic trackers of infectious diseases, such as ProMED-mail, picked up the electronic traffic and warned that the outbreak might be caused by a previously unknown virus that attacked the respiratory system.

Officially, the United Nations’WorldHealth Organization (WHO) could not act on this information. Under its rules, which could only be changed by a vote of its 192 member nations, the WHO was supposed to respond only to government alerts. However, spurred by messages from ordinary citizens and private aggregators of data, the WHO continued to press the Chinese government for information. Confronted with de facto public knowledge, the government finally acknowledged the outbreak. In response, the WHO issued a global alert onMarch 12, 2003, and a travel advisory onMarch 15.

But by then it was already too late. SARS had infected travelers. It would spread to thirty countries in six months, killing 774 people and causing an estimated $40 billion in economic losses. After the epidemic was over, the WHO's member nations changed its rules to allow the organization to respond to citizen messages as well as government alerts.

It is not too far-fetched to contend that the SARS public health crisis resulted mainly froma failure of transparency.Heeding those early messages from villagers and local authorities in Guangdong Province might have averted a worldwide pandemic.

This glimpse of a technology-enabled future revealed that the ordinary citizens who have traditionally been the users of information could become also its sources. Villagers shared fragments of experience. Collectively, those fragments formed a compelling mosaic of a rapidly spreading infectious disease and ultimately spurred international action. In effect, geographically dispersed individuals collectively created their own transparency system using new communication technology. That system in turn changed the character of international infectious disease reporting.