Pandemics

According to the FCC, a pandemic occurs when “a novel strain of a virus appears that causes readily transmissible illness or which most of the population lacks immunity”. The most common kind of pandemic is influenza that happens with little to no warning and spreads geographically at a rapid pace that can last for 3 months. The scariest part of pandemics is that even the leading health and disease control specialists have no way of knowing when the next pandemic will strike and what variant strain could form. Strains can form and mutate into new “knots” that no one can predict.

During pandemics up to 40% of the nation’s workforce would be absent due to precautionary/quarantine efforts. This can cause major communication losses , where the ability to communicate via phone, text, or email could be disrupted. This could have a cataclysmic effect on our daily operations resulting in looting/stealing, highly increased crime, physical harm to others, and an anarchy infused society.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has the pressure of dealing with catastrophes of this sort. On their website, they have a section providing information about pandemic flu specifically. This week they had a blog designated to the correlation between what they do, and the blockbuster movie “Contagion” that I recently saw in theaters. Heroic scientists battling imminent life and death situations are not just part of a movie plot; it is real life. The real stories of CDC disease detectives are just as exciting and imperative as in the movie. Contagion really created an intelligent and realistic portrayal of pandemic circumstances.

Movie star legends portrayed government response to pandemic in the movie Contagion. Controversy will always be a role when there is a major health crisis, and blogger journalist (Jude Law) dug deep into issues and secrecies of governmental decisions. He said that CDC officials and the White House were “in bed” with pharmaceutical companies while developing a vaccine to prevent again the strain of virus, and that money and power overrode the need to save millions of lives. He thought that they were holding out the truth of other natural ways of vaccination and prevention in order to gain money from pharmaceutical moguls. In the movie his blog caused a worldwide uproar, which is a definite possiibility to happen in real life in the social media and internet guided society that we live in today. Other countries in the movie looked at the United States as holding out on them when a vaccine was created and they even held a prominent scientist hostage in order to obtain vaccination from the power houses of the world.

The CDC and worldwide disease investigators are on call 24/7 in times of need. This movie was eye opening in the way that human’s primal instincts for survival really take focus. Matt Damon played a man who lost his wife and child and was immune to the disease. His sole purpose was to provide for the daughter he had left. He never reverted to crime or physicality to survive, and stayed away for the anarchy that was developing all around him. Lawrence Fishbourne who portrayed the Dr. Ellis Cheever, a disease control specialist for the CDC, is working to help the greater good, but takes care of his family and close friends first by even giving up a vaccination for himself. We all take for granted the people that are working constantly to protect us, and it goes to show that we may not trust all that the government does, but it times of disparity, they are all we have to rely on.

Figuring out the cause and next move of a pandemic and its strain is like trying to complete a puzzle where the last piece constantly changes. Scientists need live samples to test and trial and error is really the only way we have for developing prevention. At the end of the movie, Contagion, it showcased how a bat dropping infected food into a pig’s den was the start of a worldwide pandemic. It only takes one small thing, but it has enough power to keep us and our top specialists doing guesswork.