A Centre to the Storm

Front-line Notes on the SARS Outbreak in Singapore

https://doi.org/10.1142/11987 | January 2026

Pages: 180

By (author):
Poh Lian Lim (National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), Singapore)

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In 2003, a US-trained Malaysian infectious disease doctor moved from Seattle to Singapore with her husband and young family. She started work 3 weeks before the first SARS patient was admitted to the hospital which became Ground Zero for SARS in Singapore. This is a firsthand account of her experiences as a frontline doctor in a terrifying outbreak as a completely new virus swept through Singapore.

This book tells the story of the healthcare workers and patients caught up in the SARS outbreak in Singapore, and distills medical and public insights from hard-won experience fighting a completely unknown virus, and successfully shutting down the first pandemic of the 21st century despite having no effective vaccines or antiviral medications.

Contents:

Index of a Tragedy
How SARS Started in Singapore
The Story of E
Caught on the First Wave
The Challenge of Characterizing a Novel Pathogen
The Story of Dr H
Super-spreader
Isolation and Cohorting, Death Certificates
A Mother-Daughter Story
Taxi, Taxi
Contact Tracing and Quarantine, Ethical Challenges
The Story of the Cabbie Who Didn't Know
Everything But the Kitchen Sink
Treatment: Ribavirin, Steroids, Convalescent Serum
A Story of Hope Deferred
Fear, Forwarding and Escape
Spread to SGH, NUH, the Prime Minister's Letter
The Story of Dr A
Pasir Panjang
Leadership, Command and Control, Communication
A Story of Mice and Men
The Outbreak Ends
Research, Publications and Politics
The Story of Dr L
Lab Accident
Vero E6 Cells, West Nile Virus and WHO Investigations
The Story of a Vial
A Center to the Storm
Helicopters, Storm Crows, and the Stigma of SARS
My Story
How SARS Prepared Singapore for COVID-19

Readership: Primary market: General readers in Singapore, the US, Europe and Asia with an interest in SARS, emerging infections and outbreaks. Secondary market: Medical school libraries with a medical humanities section, Policy makers, healthcare workers.

Poh Lian Lim MD, MPH is Director for the High-Level Isolation Unit (HLIU) at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), and Senior Consultant in the Ministry of Health (MOH), Singapore.

Dr Lim grew up in Malaysia, studied biochemistry at Harvard, medicine at Columbia, and public health at Tulane. She did her internal medicine residency at Harvard's Beth Israel Hospital and infectious diseases fellowship in New Orleans before going into private practice in Seattle.

In 2003, Dr Lim started work at Tan Tock Seng Hospital 3 weeks before SARS hit Singapore. For her work as a front-line ID physician during the SARS outbreak, she received the Courage Star and National Day Commendation Medal. She also published the first lab-acquired SARS case in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr Lim chairs the WHO's Technical Advisory Group for Health Security Interface, working on preparedness and response for deliberate events. She was appointed to the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Steering Committee for a decade, the UN Secretary General's Global Health Crises Taskforce in 2016, the WHO Advisory Group on Reform of Work in Outbreaks and Health Emergencies in 2015 post-Ebola. She has been actively engaged in outbreak responses to dengue, chikungunya, leptospirosis, H1N1 2009, as well as Singapore's preparedness for Ebola, MERS, Zika and yellow fever.

Dr Lim served as Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Tan Tock Seng Hospital from 2012 to 2016, and is Head of the Travelers' Health & Vaccination Clinic at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. She holds academic appointments as Associate Professor on the faculty of LKC and NUS Schools of Medicine and Public Health. Professional interests include outbreaks, vaccines, public health, HIV clinical trials, travel and tropical medicine.

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A Centre to the Storm