Film: Contagion

                

The film Contagion deals with a woman (Beth), who returns from a trip from Hong Kong and then she and several others from the area she visited become sick and die within a period of three days. This sickness begins as an outbreak and then grows exponentially around the world. The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention work arduously to find replicate it and create a vaccine for the disease, but it mutates quickly and takes a long time to finally make a successful vaccine. Meanwhile, there is panic around the U.S. due to the negative media and large death toll. I thought the movie was, in all honesty, quite scary. It emphasized on   that public health tells us to do – wash hands, don’t sneeze on your hands, don’t touch your face too much – and the like. Also, it also showed the many complicated processes that go in to trying to attack such a serious problem as a pandemic. This week in lab we learned how to properly state a “problem definition” and then work from there to solve the specifics on this problem. In the movie, however, there were so many factors to worry about and try to track since it was such a large population of people and the disease was spreading extremely rapidly while the issues of rising death tolls, panic in reaction to social media and harder and harder ethical decisions continued to occur. It made me think of how hard it is to address and try to solve such an issue is with all the factors surrounding the problem going on around it. This was my first time seeing this movie.

There were several public health concepts in the film. Initially there was an outbreak with Beth when she returned and started spreading the disease, which is a sudden and violent start of something unwelcome, in this case being the infection. Following that, when more cases were heard about the same symptoms and similar death, it was made apparent that this was a threat to others and an outbreak investigation began in which the members of the CDC would form a hypothesis for what could be happening, test or try to find the cause of the outbreak, and then take appropriate measures as needed. Once there were clear indications of who had the infection and who didn't, many people were put in isolation, either to avoid those who had the disease or not infect those who did not have it. We saw this with Mitch and his daughter as they separated themselves from others as much as possible avoiding physical contact. Lastly, large areas of affected people were quarantined, meaning placed together away from others without the infection, so that the infection would be concentrated in one area and can also be triaged and treated with ease. The area in which Mitch and his daughter lived was quarantined and blocked off; no one was allowed to leave or enter this area since it was immensely infected.

One of the main points which stood out to me from chapter 29 was expect the unexpected. Be ready to respond to unanticipated problems. Obviously this infection was an unanticipated problem. However, one of the actions that the public health agencies could have taken for better preparation was to pay more attention to the infection as the outbreak started. In 2009 in the United States there was an outbreak of swine flu, otherwise known as H1N1. Fortunately, the case was not as critical as anticipated; that was because the infection was isolated quickly. The infection in Contagion, however, was not isolated quickly and therefore spread all over the country. The book also says that warnings should be issued and evacuations ordered by the appropriate agencies. The warnings should be delivered in a manner that will prompt appropriate action by the population. In the film we saw that there was massive panic due to uncertainty and sudden quarantine of large areas. If communication was done more clearly from the CDC and government agencies to the people, then such reactions might not have occurred and the infection could have been controlled in a more organized manner.