Patcharaporn "Nok" Buranakul's flight back to Michigan was easier than her flight home to Thailand.
Buranakul, a teaching as a second language graduate student, boarded her plane home to Bangkok in May during the height of the SARS epidemic.
Armed with a face mask, she returned to a now quiet city.
"There were no tourists, not even Japanese visitors," she said.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome halted travel to parts of Asia and Canada this summer as 8,437 people worldwide became infected by the mysterious illness. There were 813 deaths internationally, none of which were in the United States.
MSU canceled one spring and three summer study abroad programs because of SARS, and a fifth was rerouted.
One of these was a James Madison College program led by Professor Simei Qing.
Qing said none of the MSU students in the program chose to visit Asia individually, but some students in a similar sister program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill waited until July and went on their own.
"They all got back safe and sound," Qing said after hearing from the students in the program.
The canceled study abroad programs are all scheduled for this summer, but no one has signed up yet, according to Study Abroad officials.
Travel bans were lifted later in the summer, but Buranakul said people were still afraid to talk to tourists, especially if they were Chinese.
She said Thailand wasn't as heavily affected by SARS as other countries because there were less than a half-dozen cases reported there.
Buranakul didn't run into any trouble when she re-entered the United States. She passed through a nursing tent in the airport and said she received an orange slip telling her to contact health officials if a SARS-like symptom developed.
International students entering MSU receive a tuberculosis screening and immunization recommendations, Dr. Beth Alexander of Olin Health Center said.
But concern about SARS seems to be gone for now, health officials say. Michigan had no SARS cases this year, but three cases were initially looked into.
The state is now better prepared to deal with another outbreak said Geralyn Lasher, Michigan Department of Community Health spokeswoman.
Alexander said she's keeping an eye on potentially dangerous situations.
She added there was a lot to learn from SARS.
"Probably the most important thing learned was that we are a global society and we are sharing global germs," she said. "Even if there's not another outbreak, there will be more diseases we find that affect the whole planet."
