A pandemic (from the Greek word, pan meaning all, and demos meaning people) is a larger population of people that are infected with the same contagious virus. Over our history, there have been many pandemics. One of the most famous pandemic is the Bubonic Plague, or the Black Death. The movie Contagion seemed to be modeled after this virus.
In the movie, a new virus (MEV-1) is bred in a bat, then mutates in a pig. After the first human is affected, the virus spreads rapidly throughout the world. The MEV-1 virus had an incubation period of a few days, and typically death shortly after symptoms appeared. The symptoms of this virus were cough, headache, general ill feeling, fever, seizures, and as a prelude to death, frothing of the mouth. The Bubonic Plague is thought to originated in the flea, and carried by rodents. This virus spread rapidly throughout Europe and Asia, and is estimated to have killed 75 million people. The virus not only devastated the human population, but was directly related to the downfall of the Yuan Dynasty. The symptoms of the Bubonic Plague are chills, fever, general ill feeling, headache, muscle pain, seizures, and painful lymph gland swelling. Just like the MEV-1 virus, there was no treatment or vaccination for the Bubonic Plague. The movie ends with a vaccine in production, and order being restored. The Bubonic Plague however, had no vaccine during the pandemic, and the only treatment at that time, was to separate the infected from the non-infected.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001622/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague
i liked how you incorporated the movie Contagion
I like how you did a compare and contrast with the movie Contagion and the Bubonic Plaque. It is very interesting to see how they are similar and how they are different. Even though is is only a movie, it depicts an event that can actually occur.