"Contagion"

            This week, I watched the movie Contagion, which follows the path of a deadly airborne virus as it makes its way around the world.  The movie depicts how highly contagious viruses are spread and how easily they are contracted through simple everyday motions one would not even think about second-guessing.  As the disease spreads rapidly and its toll on the population greatens, public health organizations desperately work to contain the disease while working with scientists work to create and then distribute a vaccine to stop this epidemic.  Watching this movie for the first time, I was struck with paranoia.  Every time I heard someone cough, I would tense up.  I applied hand sanitizer on my hands more than I ever had in my whole lifetime.  I particularly enjoyed the last scene of the movie, in which the origin of the disease is shown and how it transfers to its first victim.  It shows how easy a disease can be started and how careful we should be with our hygiene practices.  With public health knowledge, I was able to see how public health officials reacted in such a desperate situation. They worked with epidemiologists and scientists to create a vaccine to cure the disease.  They also went through extensive measures to prevent the disease from spreading further.

            An outbreak is an occurrence of a disease in more cases than expected within a specific place or group of people over a given period of time—a sudden increase in the incidence of a disease.  The movie’s plot is driven by the outbreak of the deadly disease.  We can see the outbreak as the virus transfers from animals and then human-to-human.  When pandemonium hits the public health organizations, the rising number of cases seems much higher than expected or hoped for.  Outbreak investigations are done by epidemiologists and public health officials to help identify the source of an ongoing outbreak and prevent additional cases from occurring.  In the movie, we see public health officials working to try to find a place of origin of the disease, how it was transmitted, and how to create a vaccine to cure it.  Isolation and quarantine are public health practices used to stop or limit the spread of disease.  Isolation is used to separate those who have been infected with the disease from a society where people are healthy.  In the movie, the people who had the disease were taken into medical institutions in order to prevent greater spread of the disease.  Quarantine is when people who have been exposed to the disease are separated from society.  Doctors then observe them to see if they become ill with the disease as well.  After his wife and son died from the disease, Mr. Emhoff was placed in quarantine due to his exposure to the disease from his close family.

            A major sector of public health is preparedness.  In the movie, the public health agencies were unprepared in their immediate response to the outbreak.  The hospitals were not prepared for such a large-scaled disease.  They filled beds up so quickly and patients were kept too close.  This further allowed the disease to be transmitted easily.  There was also a lack of hospital staffing.  Doctors and nurses treated the ill and put themselves in risk of contracting the disease as well.  Once they did develop the disease, there were less health officials to help the sick patients.  The CDC should have made sure those people were better protected against the disease or given the vaccine first so they could still help others.  Lastly, the public health organizations withheld the severity of the disease outbreak too long.  They should have immediately notified the public and told them what they should do to protect themselves.  This could have limited the spread and the overall severity of the disease.