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Carlo Urbani, the scientist who discovered the first clue that a dangerous new microbe was beginning to spread around the globe, succumbed Saturday in a Bangkok, Thailand, hospital bed to the frightening disease he alerted the world to.

It was Urbani, an Italian epidemiologist at the World Health Organization's office in Hanoi, Vietnam, who first responded last month when anxious hospital officials phoned to report that a sick U.S. businessman was infecting doctors and nurses with a strange pneumonia. Within days, Urbani himself fell ill.

"Carlo was the one who very quickly saw that this was something very strange. When people became very concerned in the hospital, he was there every day," said Pascale Brudon, the WHO representative in Hanoi. "We are all devastated."

The pneumonia, now known SARS, for severe acute respiratory syndrome, has become the focus of a worldwide health emergency. U.S. health officials warned yesterday against any unnecessary travel to Hanoi, Singapore and all of China and outlined stringent measures to keep infected people from spreading the sometimes fatal disease.

"There are clearly some patients who appear to be highly infectious," said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding. "We are very concerned about the spread of this virus. We may be in the very early stages of what might be a much larger problem."

The disease is the first dangerous new infection that spreads directly from one person to another to emerge in decades. The story of how it surfaced, and how Urbani and the rest of the world responded, has profound implications for humanity's readiness to fight dangerous new germs, whether they evolve naturally or are grown deliberately in a bioterrorist's lab.

"If there's an influenza pandemic, or if there's a deliberate release of a biological weapon, there will be many valuable lessons from this experience," said David L. Heymann, head of WHO's communicable diseases program. "This is really the first time we've attempted something on this scale, and the global community has pulled together."

By the time the sick Chinese-American businessman, Johnny Cheng, made it to the French Hospital in Hanoi on Feb. 26, he was already deathly ill. It looked like pneumonia, but Cheng's high fever, cough and other symptoms worried doctors. Cheng had just flown in from Hong Kong, where a father and son had recently died from the "bird flu," a deadly bug that experts long feared might spark a pandemic rivaling the Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed as many as 50 million people.

Urbani called his regional supervisor in Manila.

"He was reporting a probable case of bird flu," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson, who happened to be where the phone rang on March 5. He was sitting at the desk of a colleague who had been dispatched to Beijing to persuade officials to be less secretive about a mysterious outbreak in the Guangdong province in southern China. Since early February, WHO had been hearing reports that hundreds of people were getting sick with what sounded like a strange form of pneumonia. Officials worried that it, too, might be bird flu.

Unbeknownst to health authorities at the time, Cheng, 48, had stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong at the same time as a 64-year-old Chinese professor who had been treating patients in Guangdong. The professor, in Hong Kong for a wedding, had checked into Room 911.

Investigators later determined that he infected at least seven other guests in the hotel, perhaps by coughing while waiting for an elevator. Among them were several tourists, who then spread the disease to Singapore, Hong Kong, Toronto, and elsewhere. The professor died in a Hong Kong hospital after infecting two family members and four hospital workers.

But in early March, neither Urbani nor anyone else knew any of that. So over the next week, "Carlo kept going back to the hospital" in Hanoi to take samples, Thompson said. "Carlo kept going back and working with the staff there, who themselves started to get sick. And then Carlo got sick."

As the number of sick hospital workers in Hanoi mounted, WHO alerted its Global Outbreak and Response Network, an international collaboration set up at its Geneva headquarters three years ago specifically to spot the first signs of what could be the next pandemic. As part of the network, a Canadian computer program scours everything from newspaper reports to Internet chat rooms every day, searching for telltale clues.

"Every morning we have a meeting in a large conference room. We discuss whatever reports of outbreaks have come in: 'How they are being tracked? What's being done about them?' " Thompson said.

With the number of sick hospital workers in Hanoi rising, businessman Cheng was transferred back to a hospital in Hong Kong. On March 13, he died, but not before infecting more hospital workers. WHO sent an official from Beijing to Hanoi to investigate.

By March 11, dozens of health care workers at the Hanoi hospital were sick, including several who were critically ill, and the facility was overwhelmed. Officials shut it down and imposed a quarantine. Urbani had been transferred to a hospital in Bangkok.

WHO assembled four international teams to help medical workers cope, track the spread of the disease, search for its cause and find a way to fight it.

With another outbreak now affecting dozens of hospital workers in Hanoi and Hong Kong, WHO issued a very unusual alert on March 12, warning that a mysterious flu-like illness appeared to be spreading in parts of Asia. The cause was unknown, but it appeared to be highly contagious. But with war looming in Iraq, the alert received little attention.

Over the next few days, the number of cases in Hanoi continued to mount and WHO started getting reports of outbreaks at more hospitals in Hong Kong, as well as in Singapore. Three Singapore women who had stayed at the Metropole fell ill after they returned home, apparently infecting dozens of doctors and nurses, who in turn infected dozens more. Other possible cases were being reported in Thailand and possibly the Philippines.

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