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Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has emerged from China as an inappropriate and rapidly transmitting respiratory disease with unknown etiology at the time of its occurrence. The World Health Organization has responded by invoking traditional public health measures and advanced technologies to control disease and contain the cause. A new coronavirus is responsible for the disease with all of its genome identified in mid-April 2003. The urgency of responding to this threat focused on scientific effort and stimulated global cooperation. The present paper, through a bibliographic review, focuses on the first application of the accumulation of knowledge and global cooperation to a twenty-first century pandemic threat and on the other hand synthesizes the lessons learned from this remarkable achievement and highlights the importance of nursing staff.