Why an intensive care doctor has become an untouchable in his home

Tom Buckley has not hugged his children for three weeks. As an intensive care specialist, he was among the first to witness the lethal power of the mystery pneumonia virus spreading in Hong Kong. He now lives under a strict self-imposed quarantine to protect his family – but he still does not know whether it is strict enough.

When he gets home he showers and changes his clothes before greeting the children. He uses separate utensils, sleeps in a separate room and wears a mask at all times. From a distance, he observes his children, watching anxiously for the first sign of disease. There are no kisses, no caresses, no soothing hands. He has become untouchable.

When the first patients struck by the virus started arriving at Hong Kong's Prince of Wales Hospital on 12 March, Dr Buckley, 48, and his fellow specialists had seen nothing like it. What it did to the patients was frightening enough, but it also began cutting down the doctors and nurses caring for them.

"These patients had fevers, rigors, chills and muscle pains," Dr Buckley said. "In three or four days there were changes in their chest X-rays and they became breathless and needed oxygen. Then the doctors and nurses started falling ill. In the intensive care unit we were admitting a lot of patients and their clinical state was deteriorating rapidly and no one was getting better. We couldn't see an end to it."

Within days the Prince of Wales' 24-bed intensive care unit was full. Each bed was taken by a patient with what had become known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars). Half of them needed mechanical ventilation to keep them alive.

"There were young people, doctors and nurses in their 20s and 30s, becoming very ill in a very short period. When people are deteriorating and your clinical expertise is pushed to the absolute limit you wonder where it is going to go next. A lot of them looked as if they were going to die," Dr Buckley said.

Dr Buckley, as acting head of the intensive care unit in the week when Sars broke out, was responsible for the safety of his staff. He knew the illness was highly contagious. He had to save the patients but, even more urgently, he had to stop whatever was causing their disease from spreading, before it destroyed him, his staff and his hospital. Tough infection control procedures were introduced. All intensive care staff, who normally wore ordinary street clothes, were instructed to "gown up" in green theatre garb with cap, gloves, visor and mask at all times.

Computer keyboards and telephone handsets were wrapped in cling film, which was changed each day. Nothing was allowed in or out of the unit unless absolutely necessary.

Dr Buckley added: "We didn't know what we were dealing with. That was the fear. We were watching this disease being transmitted so easily into medical staff on the wards. We were upgrading our infection control procedures hour by hour. When your staff are taking full precautions and they still contract this disease, it is devastating."

In all, 180 patients with Sars have been admitted to the Prince of Wales Hospital, more than 100 of them doctors, nurses and other health workers who caught it from their patients. Yet there have been only five deaths.

The worst, says Dr Buckley, has not happened. Many of the most seriously ill patients, who were on ventilators and looked as if they might die, began to get better. But they owe their lives to the technology of modern medical care, not to any weakness in the virus.

What Dr Buckley and his colleagues were unable to save was their hospital.

The huge 1,300-bed institution is now closed, its gleaming wards empty, its nursing stations abandoned, its ambulances dispatched elsewhere.

It will save no more lives, or heal the sick, or comfort the dying until the epidemic has passed and the lethal organisms lurking in its fabric can be cleaned away.