Hong Kong may be looking to the Pearl River Delta as its future, but it could also have a devastating downside. Scientists have long viewed southern China as an influenza hotbed from which the next global pandemic could emanate.
Sars pulled back economic growth, but the next virus to strike Hong Kong - and some experts believe it could well be an unstoppable strain of bird flu - may well provoke a downward spiral.
Both viruses have been pin-pointed as evolving from southern China, although the exact source remains a mystery. The region was also where two of the three pandemics to sweep the world during the last century evolved.
The Asian flu in 1957 killed one million people and the Hong Kong flu 11 years later took the lives of 700,000. The world's worst-known pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu outbreak of 1918, took the lives of between 18 million and 22 million people.
Microbiologists who have been struggling for a decade with the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, believe it has the potential to be far more devastating. They say the threat is far greater than that posed by Sars.
One of the world's leading bird flu researchers, University of Hong Kong assistant professor Guan Yi, said last Tuesday that the virus had the potential to kill untold numbers of people if efforts to control it failed. His fears were later echoed by international health officials as the virus began spreading across East Asia.
