Community psycho-behavioural surveillance and related impact on outbreak control in Hong Kong and Singapore during the SARS epidemic

: 1. The promotion of personal protective health practices must take into account background perceptions of risk and psychological responses in the community-at-large. 2. Population psycho-behavioural factors in Hong Kong and Singapore are shown to be an important potential vector for the transmission of an infectious agent. 3. Comparative psycho-behavioural surveillance and analysis can yield important insights into generic versus population-specific issues that could be used to inform, design and benchmark public health infection control measures.