A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that spreads throughout a large mass of human populations. This could be within regions, nations or world wide. However, if the number of people who are infected by the disease stabilizes, it is not a pandemic, but an endemic. In the movie Contagion, the blockbuster movie that hit theaters a few weeks ago, this highly contagious and deadly disease was most certainly a pandemic. It was effecting any and everyone within it’s path. The disease was killing more people before The Center for Disease Control Prevention (CDC) and health officials could even determine what it was, let alone how to cure it. People all over the world were crazed over the disease that was killing so many in such a short amount of time. Unfortunately, since the CDC and health officials had never experienced such an outbreak with a disease killing so quickly, people were acting like animals because they had no answer or solution to such a deadly and infectious pandemic.
Pandemic of influenza is the most common pandemic. The scariest part of a pandemic is having little or no warning of an outbreak. It can be spread all over the world before we even know what it is. Leading health specialists and disease control specialists have no way of determining when an outbreak may occur, how it’s being spread and how to treat it. There are endless strains from countless diseases that could form. Strains form and mutate in knots that have no sign or predetermination. It could take health officials days before figuring out the strains and even longer for test results to come back. The CDC deals with the outbreaks of these disasters.
The movie Contagion shows the effect such a pandemic has on the people, to members in the CDC, to the doctors trying to figure out where the disease came from and how to keep it from spreading. Matt Damon’s character, Mitch Emhoff, is one of the ordinary, everyday people, who happens to be the first to experience this horrendous infection. His wife Beth Emhoff, played by Gwenyth Paltrow, is the first to be infected with the disease in Hong Kong on a business trip and dies a few days later because of it. Lawrence Fishbourne plays as Dr. Ellis Cheever, a disease control specialist for the CDC. Throughout the the movie he is working with Dr. Erin Meers, played by Kate Winslet, who is an Epidemic Service Officer. She is sent to Minneapolis to begin the investigation and traceback. Unfortunately, while she is away preparing to quarantine the city and take in infected people, she becomes ill with the sickness herself. There will be controversy no matter what the disaster or catastrophe, blogger and journalist Alan Krumwiede, portrayed by Jude Law, posts videos and blogs over the internet that claim he has found a cure for the disease based on forsythia. Panicked people attempt to get a hold of forsythia by breaking into pharmacies and drug stores. Alan Krumwiede begins blaming the CDC for keeping information to the people a secret and accuses Dr. Cheever of only telling his loved ones of the seriousness of the diseases and that they should evacuate the city immediately. Later, it is found Krumwiede was only attempting to enhance the demand of companies producing and distributing the treatment.
The scariest part of the movie is that it could happen. Swine Flu and made cow disease are a few examples, of a much smaller pandemic in comparison to the movie Contagion.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/
http://contagionmovie.warnerbros.com/index.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2011/0909/Contagion-movie-review
With all the people living in the world today, news travels so fast through social media, print, and television. We are aware of everything that goes on around us. We don’t worry about something like a pandemic until you see people going paranoid. It is a scary thought that a pandemic will kill you. To keep yourself sane, we go about our lives as regularly as possible.
Our medicinal practices have come such a long way, but we still cannot predict when the next pandemic will occur, and what strain of virus/disease it will be. The scariest thing about the movie, Contagion, was how accurately portrayed it was, and how such anarchy ensued. The CDC couldn’t even keep up with the demands of the people and so many civilians felt hopeless and lost, but their instinct for survival overcame that. The government’s roll was negatively portrayed as well where they used the outbreak to still think of the profit from vaccination and kept U.S. advances secret from the rest of the world. Things like this will happen and have in a time of crisis, but it should not be the way the world works.