Caution is the watchword for journalists involved in frontline reporting on the mysterious, highly contagious disease. Some editors are discouraging in-person interviews and implementing other health precautions to reduce the risks. Meanwhile, a debate swirls: Has the coverage been hyped or on target?

In May, a Wall Street Journal editor opened a conference call with correspondents in Asia by asking, "What is the radius of a sneeze?" At first, reporters thought he was speaking rhetorically or joking. Then came the answer. "It's 15 feet. One sneeze and you're screwed," John Bussey, a deputy managing editor based in Hong Kong, told his staff.

Vigilance has become the watchword for journalists operating in the epicenter of the SARS epidemic, where sneeze droplets are described as "biological bullets" and leaky sewer pipes turn into deadly carriers.

As the virus spread, retooling news operations and reporting strategies became a matter of survival.

CNN Beijing Bureau Chief Jaime FlorCruz admits to being compulsive about washing his hands since Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome surfaced in his backyard. He pushes elevator buttons with his car keys, checks his body temperature every day and no longer plays pickup basketball with a group of jocks.

Every time he sneezes, coughs or feels fatigued, FlorCruz frets: "Could it be SARS? Could I pass it on to my family and friends?" The longtime resident of Beijing has reason to worry.

In April, he traveled with a CNN crew to Foshan in southern Guangdong province, an area known as the petri dish of SARS. Entering a hot zone, says FlorCruz, is like "living in a virtual battlefield, confronting an invisible, mysterious enemy."

When Matt Pottinger of the Wall Street Journal received a care package from his mother, there were no homemade brownies. Instead, he found boxes of sterile alcohol pads, high-quality plastic gloves and containers of Purell, a hand sterilizer, which boasts a 99.9 percent germ kill rate--precious commodities for a reporter pursuing the trail of the killer virus in Hong Kong.

Residents picked shelves clean of safeguards as the infection swept the former British colony famous for its exotic nightlife and international trade. Pottinger's newspaper supplied N95 surgical masks, specially designed to filter out viruses. Journal staffers have been required to wear them in the office and many "have stacks of these in our homes," he says.

Freelance photographer David McIntyre was on assignment for BusinessWeek when he entered the lobby of one of the world's largest factories in the south China city of Zhuhai. Suddenly, he was confronted by a glum-faced security guard who poked a thermometer into his ear.

He was allowed to enter only after a card was attached to a visitor's badge, designating his temperature as normal. McIntyre noted that at airports in China, the Ground Zero of SARS, infrared guns are aimed at passengers' foreheads to check for fever, a symptom of the mysterious ailment.

"We can't be sure where it is lurking," the photographer says. "When someone coughs, you always wonder if they are a...