Pandemics in Movies

-Brian is an ecologist for the CDC, specializing in infectious diseases.

-Today I'm breaking down clips from movies and television about pandemics. I'd like to go on record that I love all these movies. I don't want to come across as a not a fan because I am.

-Small-town outbreak from the movie Outbreak.

-Get the supplies. Bring them in.

-What could be holding them up?

-I don't know.

-There they are now.

-Greg Feller, Chief of Police. This is Mayor Gettus.

-This one has so many flaws. You see people shaking hands and that doesn't occur in an outbreak area. If there is some kind of a greeting, it's usually elbow to elbow. The PPE, personal protective equipment, is reasonably accurate. We don't go into a place wearing helmets and hazmat suits like that. But the PAPRs, air purifying respirators, that they have on their waists are PAPRS that we have used in the past. And the whole point of the powered air is that you have positive pressure inside the head cover. It's pushing air out and nothing can come in.

-So many.

-They go from this right here with a full hazmat suit and a helmet to guys with surgical masks. You notice that she's not wearing any eye protection and the guy directly behind her is. So, one of the little details that if this were truly a field virus outbreak, and this was an isolation ward, they would all have a face shield or eye protection. Some gloves, not, some others without gloves. It's total chaos. It's a mess. That's pure Hollywood fiction.

-Apparently, they all got it in the movie theater.

-Smallpox ER.

-When did the rash start?

-Three days ago.

-We’ll move you to a private room. Can you take Adam? Follow me quickly.

-What is it?

-It's just a precaution. Excuse me, coming through here. I got two cases of smallpox.

-Oh my god.

-Dun dun dun. This is a tad on the far-fetched side because smallpox was eradicated in 1980.

-They have a vaccine for it now. The CDC should have a stockpile of it.

-All the smallpox that exists in the world are in freezers in really secure labs.

-Smallpox has been eradicated.

-I heard the Russians had some on ice. If a terrorist group got a hold of it...

-Shut up, Jerry.

-And for this to actually have happened, there would have to have been some kind of a very, very serious breach in security.

-Damn, I should have called in sick today.

-We're gonna look at a couple of scenes from Contagion. And here's where they explain the spread of the virus.

-Here is a model of the virus and how it attaches to its host. The blue is virus, and the gold is human. And the red is the viral attachment protein, and the green is its receptor in the human cells.

-It is available. This computer software is able to form sort of a three-dimensional image of the virus itself. And they can identify, through sequencing, which parts of the virus are the receptors, where it binds to the human cell, which parts are coding for certain proteins that cause illness or replication.

-And we've sequenced the virus and determined its origin and we've modeled the way it enters the cells of the lung in the brain.

-Very accurate in terms of being able to pinpoint certain areas of the genome that will have certain effects on the human or on the virus or even the cell that it's infecting.