Did you wash those hands? (Comment).

WITH due sympathies to tourism officials in Toronto, Beijing and Hong Kong, it's not hard to understand why the World Health Organization took the extraordinary step of advising against travel to those great cities because of the SARS outbreak.

The still-mysterious respiratory disease has only inflicted small population pockets but it's hard to deny its potency. Hong Kong officials now say the mortality rate is 13.8 percent, way up from earlier estimates of 5 percent. It's still an exercise in guesstimation -- a possible case isn't likely to turn into a probable case, a respiratory-related death isn't necessary a SARS death. Such uncertainties no doubt led to last week's travel advisory, which as you can imagine isn't going down real well in Canada.

If nothing else, the frantic reaction to SARS has the indirect effect of reminding everybody how easily germs can spread -- and how blase we are about simple preventative measures, like hand-washing and mouth-covering.

And what about touching those TV screens on airplanes with little regard to who was doing the touching on the previous 50 flights?

When it comes to breeding grounds for disease, however, you needn't even go to the airport. Try the workplace. Our office, hardly different from most, is a hotbed of bacteria that gets spread around like cards at a blackjack table.

There are the big bags of cookies and chips that are reached into by hands that may not be the cleanest.

There is the community kitchen with its two sorry sponges (probably going back to a 1988 purchase) that are dutifully used by folks even though they're no doubt festering with microscopic bugs.

There are the kids of our employees who routinely get sick and infect their parents, who then infect everyone else.

There are the close quarters of our newsroom where somebody's bad cough has a way of spreading into the next two workstations.

There is our Bloomberg terminal that is shared by reporters and editors, which means a lot of hands on a single keyboard.

There are the public restrooms, which are outside our offices and used by anyone having business in our building -- and we're talking hundreds of people on a given day. People who might have colds, people who might not have washed their hands that day, people whose hygiene is, well, not the greatest. Ugh!

We are, alas, a pretty slobby species and pretty oblivious to our germ-spreading ways. Why? Because we know we can get away with it.

The human body is an amazingly resilient piece of machinery. Compare its durability to a laptop computer that could conk out on the slightest coffee spill. Human beings keep marching on, oblivious to the elements. And so what if the kitchen sponges are a little ratty? We'll scrub out our coffee mugs with them just the same.

What concerns epidemiologists is that this carelessness will eventually catch up with us when some monster of a germ starts spreading like wildfire because everybody is coughing at each other or eating from the same bag of chips. These worries predate SARS, though the current outbreak does illustrate the potential magnitude of a highly contagious illness. Just consider what happened in Toronto, not exactly a Third World burgh.

The good news is that we have a well-calibrated public health network that can quickly detect unusual patterns in the numbers of people who get sick. Next to the primitive conditions in many parts of the world, it's a medical marvel.

If our office kitchen is any indicator, we'll need it some day.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.