HONG KONG is turning to drink, cigarettes and miniature bottles of Japanese milk bacillus in a desperate attempt to ward off Sars.

Smoking 30 cigarettes a day is one idea favoured to keep the virus at bay, so is filling the bloodstream with alcohol: whisky is reckoned to have the strongest antiseptic effects.

A healthier challenger has also emerged: Yakult, the Japanese fermented milk drink, is flying off shelves in Hong Kong and other parts of East Asia at the rate of a million bottles a day. Shops across the city are selling out of the sickly sweet liquid as quickly as wholesalers can deliver it.

When the rumour first spread among the panicky Hong Kong population, it took just three days for Yakult sales to soar by nearly 500 per cent.

Other theories have spread just as quickly, many of them propagated by businesses out for a quick profit. Hairdressers in Hong Kong have made the claim that a good hairdo can stem the spread of the virus.

As George Tan, a Hong Kong resident, said: “Everyone you talk to has a different tip about how to stay alive: lavender water, eau de cologne, turnips. Smoking is supposed to fill your lungs with so many toxins that the virus will die there anyway. My wife’s friend told her that garlic was the answer; now everything she cooks leaves us stinking.”

The Yakult craze is a classic demonstration of the power of gossip — and the huge rewards of 48 years of careful marketing by the Japanese company that makes it. Vitamin C tablets, carrots, ginger and cod liver oil capsules are all selling well, but Yakult is the clear king of the do-it- yourself anti-Sars measures.

Yakult, which is sold in its trademark tiny bottles everywhere from Mexico City to Shanghai, is based on the Lactobacillus casei bacterium discovered by a Japanese doctor in the 1930s.

The theory is that since human beings naturally employ good bacteria to fight dangerous ones, the more people drink of the former, the better. When the theory was finally turned into a commercial product, using fermented milk and selling it as a booster for the immune system, it became an instant hit in its domestic market.

Pressed on the drink’s immunising effects, a Yakult spokesman said that no link between the drink and protection from Sars had been proved, but that Yakult was still a medically accepted support for the immune system. But in the minds of Hong Kong residents it is the Sars outbreak that has elevated the drink’s status. “People used to just drink it with their breakfast,” Jo Wong, an accountant based in Hong Kong, said. “Now it’s being treated like some sort of elixir of life.”

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