Hollywood's latest thriller “Contagion” seems to have captured the public’s interest with strong sales at the box office. In the movie tens of millions of people are wiped out by the rapid spread of a killer airborne disease. It's a scenario real-life experts say is entirely plausible.
“Contagion” does a good job of “depicting something as realistically as possible,” infectious disease specialist Dr. Kamran Khan said. The film's fictional mystery disease, MEV-1, originates in Hong Kong. The first victim is a Minneapolis woman (Gwyneth Paltrow), who catches the disease after a business trip in Hong Kong. Two days later she's dead. The film poses questions similar to those that arose during the 2003 SARS pandemic – also originating in Hong Kong – that killed nearly 50 people in Toronto alone.
Khan said it's because of our interconnected world that diseases can so easily travel from one place to another. But flight technology and social media have also helped professionals to track and fight outbreaks he added.
Khan created biodiaspora to analyze real-time flight schedules, human and livestock populations and health data from around the world as a way to track the spread of infectious diseases. The program was created in response to Toronto's SARS crisis, and later predicted how the H1N1 flu virus would spread around the world in 2009.
In the weeks leading up to the Olympic Games came to Vancouver last February, experts kept track online of viruses around the world, and the number of travellers from those countries heading to Vancouver. Khan says these types of international events hold real potential for global-scale outbreaks such as the one in “Contagion.”
Khan added that individuals need to be prepared at home, and think “beyond just what we can do when a disease shows up.” In the case of a pandemic, Khan said people should be seeing their physicians, making sure their vaccines are up to date, and taking medicines pre-emptively for certain diseases that might be prevalent in other parts of the world. “Public health tends not to be very sexy, but it's our most important line of defense against pandemics and other types of infectious disease threats,” Khan said.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the scenario portrayed in the film is “quite plausible.” The CDC worked closely with the filmmakers to create a highly accurate portrayal of a growing pandemic. “We are all connected by the food we eat and the water we drink and the air we breathe,” Frieden said. “The CDC and our partners identifies one new pathogen each year, we investigate one new one each day. Something like this can happen. And even in our own lifetime, if you think about HIV, more than 25 million people have been killed by HIV around the world.”
Other illnesses also spread very quickly, Frieden noted. He explained, “The measles virus, without vaccinations, each person with measles infects 15 people. One person with measles can affect someone a hundred feet away, and it's possible even that someone who had measles leaves a place and, four hours later, someone gets in and gets infected. So, sure, this is possible, but what is important is that we can do a lot to prevent it, and to reduce the impact, as well.”
The movie uses a concept known as “R0” - pronounced “R-naught”- to explain public health officials that the new virus could be much more contagious than influenza or polio. “I wanted people to understand R0,” explains Scott Z. Burns, who wrote the film. Here it is: R0 is the number of new cases that a single infected person will cause, on average. In most seasons, R0 for influenza is just below 2. In the devastating 1918 pandemic, it was likely above 3. With an R0 that high, the number of cases will grow exponentially, unless patients remain isolated or quickly receive effective treatment.
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