During these dark times of Corona Virus being at home is not easy, what else is there to brighten one's day, then watching movies about epidemics, government cover-ups and compulsory enforced military curfew. Netflix has been satisfying people's curiosity by showing Outbreak (1995) and Contagion (2011). But it seems a lot of people have been getting their information from movies. The story behind "Outbreak" is that the US government had discovered the Motaba virus in 1967 in Zaire, Africa, which is a form of Viral Haemorrhagic Fever. The US military took blood samples and then incinerated the whole village with the hope of controlling it. Meanwhile, they had weaponized the virus and as the film insinuated, keeping it a secret as they had the perfect biological weapon, to which they only had the cure to it. Then, we were brought to the present day, unfortunately, a monkey from Africa, "escaped" quarantine and it's effects was let loose on a population of 2,600 in a small town of, Cedar Creek in the US. The military encircled the town and the plan was to incinerate the whole town to keep their secret weapon. The US military already had a serum to treat it but unfortunately, the virus had mutated and was now airborne, and that serum was ineffective. But as one can see where people got the notion that the Cov-19 virus, was a weaponized virus and the Chinese wanted to use it as a weapon or they had already had serum for it.
The second film was more realistic with our current situation, it was also a pandemic and it started in Hong Kong, China one means of control was social distancing. All these diseases are zoonotic diseases, which started in the animal kingdom and broke the barrier to humans. However, it went a step further in explaining, showing and demonstrating how this was possible. It showed the specific bat which had a specific variant of the disease and how it was transferred to a particular pig who developed a variant of the flu and this was transferred to a chef in Hong Kong in China, then to a very beautiful Gwyneth Paltrow whose character later died in the film. This was summarized by the head of the CDC in the film, "Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat".
It showed a capable team which consists of an epidemiologist, virologist, doctors, etc studying the virus were it showed genetic material from bats, pigs and eventually humans. Than "Outbreak's" lone wolf, one-man army, saving the world, which is unrealistic but rarely occurs in real life. While in the outbreak film the origin of the virus was also demonstrated as being zoonotic, and it showed a juju man, who was said to have been living in a cave praying to the gods, because man had invaded their natural habitual, and was cutting down the trees which are true to an extent. Man's invasion of the forest leads to diseases that were restricted to the animal kingdom where it was endemic, now extending to humans. Contagion did explain it fully again and again, how viruses could mutate. In one scene, as the government attempts to mount a response an agent asks Dr. Ellis Cheevers (Laurence Fishburne), the fictional head of the CDC, “Is there any way that someone could weaponize the bird flu?”. Dr. Cheevers responds, "Someone doesn’t have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are already doing that". The virus mutates very fast, and with every division of the cells there are errors, most of them don't lead to anything, but a few do result in an additional feature. In the film "Outbreak", the mutation they fear most was when it became airborne. Initially like Ebola, it was just spread by direct contact and once it became airborne it spread easily.
Hollywood, has an act of embellishing and distorting facts, as to give a great story. Apart from time-travel (12 Monkeys, 1995), zombie creating viruses (I am Legend, 2007), Resident Evil Series (2002-2017), 28 Days later, etc. These 2 films seem to offer what is similar to what we are going through now. But more especially Contagion, though some aspects of the movie are exaggerated or fictitious, according to Prof. Elizabeth Buckles, biomedical sciences, it has many lessons to offer when it comes to the importance of public health. Buckles considered this sequence plausible, emphasizing the importance of food safety even when there isn’t a zoonotic pandemic. “Handwashing, proper cooking [are important]. Even if we are not talking about something as dramatic as influenza or coronavirus, one of the main causes of human illness is a foodborne illness,” Buckles explained. “Salmonella, E. coli, all of these things can usually be traced back to improper food handling.”
While not all scientific information in movies is appropriately contextualized, Buckles hopes that movies like Contagion, help reinforce the human importance of public measures to lay viewers. One cannot see the similarities and the profiteering from fake cures as well.
Comments
Post a Comment