Contagion, A Health Inspector Movie Review

Do you ever wonder what would happen if a virus emerged somewhere that had the ability to kill most of the people on earth? Writer Scott Burns and director Steven Soderbergh attempt to answer that question in the movie Contagion. 

Contagion is not one of those typical killer disease outbreak horror flicks where someone contracts a blood oozing-like virus and the army comes in to quarantine the entire community and kill everyone before it can spread. Instead, we see an almost documentary-like account of what an epidemic looks like through the eyes of public health professionals and how our government and the public would likely respond to a killer virus invasion. 

What most people who watched the movie (and reviews I have read) do not realize is that the writer Scott Burns and director Steven Soderbergh basically took the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Pandemic Influenza Plan and brought it to life. I really didn’t think it was possible to make that plan entertaining (it’s excruciatingly dry reading). The other thing this movie does with realistic precision is capturing the challenges a public health professional faces implementing the plan during an outbreak. For example, a central element of the storyline involves Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials competing with the purveyors of pseudoscience to communicate their message in a 24-hour news cycle/twitter/ internet blogger world. We see the CDC officials meeting with stakeholders (e.g., local governments, schools) and we experience the obstacles officials face establishing quarantines and vaccine priorities on a population that has been brainwashed to hate/mistrust the government.  

Contagion is also an epidemiological mystery.  The storyline starts with Beth (Gwenyth Paltrow) catching a typical cold that untypically kills her. Her death draws the attention of the CDC, others victims are discovered and the outbreak investigation is on. However, its how Contagion weaves the systematic steps of an epidemiological investigation, including the hypothesis development, into the storyline that is most interesting. Title cards are used to frame each day of the outbreak’s development and give the audience context for subtle visual clues as to what caused the outbreak. The movie ends by taking the viewer back to day 1 of the outbreak and if you were paying attention, all those visual clues come together to reveal the origin of the virus. They are the same kind of clues a health inspector would use during a real outbreak. 

As a health inspector, I think about “the big one” every morning when I go to work because every year a virus like the one shown in Contagion emerges somewhere in the world. The barriers that have kept the “big one” from killing us all are slowly being dismantled. Development moves into the far reaches of former wilderness, exposing us to strange new microbial life. Our overpopulated cities and rapid transportation systems allow for easier and faster transmission of the disease. Meanwhile, the budgets of public health agencies are being decimated worldwide. Surveillance is being cut back, scientists and inspectors are being laid off and inspections are being decreased or halted. The scenario shown in Contagion will happen at some point in the future. I only hope that there is something left in our public health arsenal when it happens.