Contagion is the name of a new action-thriller movie about a global outbreak of a deadly viral disease. The trailer is now available. From the website:
Synopsis
“Contagion” follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure and control the panic that spreads faster than the virus itself. At the same time, ordinary people struggle to survive in a society coming apart.
I hope they get the science right. We’ll see when it opens on 9 September 2011.
Looks like we will be going on a lab field trip on September 9th!
Perhaps all the virology labs should go to the movie on 9 September. That would create a powerful field.
Wouldn’t a virus that kills within a few days not actually have a long enough incubation period to cause a worldwide epidemic. It would literally burn itself out before it could actually infect a lot of people. I used to play with this primitive epidemiology program called wildfire (a little gem), it would let you play with the settings and attributes of a virus. If you made a super demon virus that killed in a day, it would wipe out a few people, but they would all die before they could spread it. Since, though it was more deadly, the probability of spread and infection is far lower.
The only way it could be remotely effective would be if caused no symptoms and just suddenly had a instant/fast onset of death, or if it could remain shedding for a long time after challenge, but that probably isn’t dramatic enough to be in a hollywood film. Even if it had minor symptoms, it could still be controlled through a simple quarantine policy. (which wouldn’t be that economically unfeasible, since someone will only be unproductive for the few days that would determine that it isn’t lethal or not.Now if the movie was about a latent virus that doesn’t present symptoms for say 5-10 years, that showed little to no symptoms, and was transmitted by something that people are compelled and want to do (often with regularity and vigour :P). Say it doesn’t actually kill itself, but, hmmm, i don’t know, kills by suppressing the immune system which allows opportunistic secondary infections…
Ebola: 1511 Â AIDS: ~30 million and growing
If this were football, I know which team I would support
Best line: “They don’t have to weaponize bird flu. [dramatic pause] The birds are doing it.”
I have recruited my own “CDC” to the movies when it gets in Brazil!
Yes, and I think designing such a virus would be very, very difficult, which is why I don’t worry about this kind of threat.
H5N1 has had over 10 years to evolve into something that will kill a lot of us. I remember the blogs about 5-7 years ago that purported that it had reached stage 5 of the pandemic level and was about to do what this movie trailer has it doing. It didn’t and hasn’t yet.
Nevertheless, it ought to be a good thriller movie.
@profvrr:disqus How about having a twiv listener meetup/live twiv in the city and then we could club this with the movie. Lot of other podcasts/blogs have reader/listener meetups. It would be a nice forum for discussing some interesting virology concepts for folks in the tri state area. Also we could invite Alan and Rich!!
I’m actually quite excited about this film 🙂
Well, seeing as Baxter International intentionally mixed H5N1 and H3N2 into the vial of “seasonal virus” stock in Austria…..I am very sure that man is dutifully doing what can be done to help viruses jump over barriers that would have kept these types of viruses from being created. The unregulated and unpoliced genetic engineering is also helping virus overcome energy barriers. In the book the Bird Flu a Virus of Our Own Hatching, we see with over three thousand references how this medical doctor author sees our own hubris creating these kinds of viruses. We don’t need to think it will be scary basement terrorists working with rabies to develop a zoombie virus, all we have to do is know it is happening in the labs and rabies being releasedÂ
Insightful comment, thanks.
Luckily in movies there is this concept called the suspension of disbelief.