Possibility of 'Contagion' Frighteningly Real

It’s probably no accident a blockbuster disaster movie called Contagion hit screens just before the start of flu season. But a real-life, out-of-control pandemic is not out of the realm of possibility.

It’s a frightening premise, even for health professionals who have not seen the movie. “What keeps virologists and people knowledgeable about this subject up at night is the understanding of the catastrophic potential of a new or 'mutated' virus,” says Dr. Stephen Jones, an infectious disease specialist and chief safety officer at Greenwich Hospital.

The culprit in “Contagion” is modeled after severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, the virus that caused a worldwide panic in 2003 but fizzled out after causing few deaths. In the movie, the deadly virus travels quickly and insidiously throughout the globe, courtesy of high-speed air travel, and attacks the central nervous systems of its victims. 

While the celluloid’s assertion might be believable, “Contagion” is just a movie, and Hollywood’s hot spotlight does not a pandemic make. The question is: Could it happen? The answer is yes. But for a truly nightmarish pandemic scenario, says Jones, the virus needs to be both deadly and highly contagious. He has not seen “Contagion” but acknowledges the potential for such a virus to “spread rapidly across the human population, especially if mankind has no known immunity and there is no time to develop a vaccine."

Jones says it is important to understand two critical aspects of a virus to assess its threat. The first is its pathogenicity — how deadly it is. And the other is its infectivity — how easily it spreads from person to person.  It is possible, Jones says, for a virus to be lethal but hard to spread, or it could be highly contagious but have low pathogenicity, as was the case with the H1N1 (bird flu) pandemic a couple of years ago.   

But “Contagion” is as much about virology as it is about public health. It demonstrates how reconstructing the course of an outbreak provides crucial clues, such as how many people an infected person can give a virus to, how many of them get sick and how many of them die. To that end, Jones says there is something positive about any outbreak: an opportunity to learn. “Unfortunately, since very bad pandemics are rare,” says Jones. “Few [health professionals] understand them and even fewer are prepared for them.” As an example, he cites the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed millions worldwide. Fortunately, epidemiological progress and scientific understanding has grown exponentially since then.

Whether a real life “Contagion”-like scenario turns out to be fantasy or prophecy depends on how public health systems perform. The key, says Jones, is preparedness. “We have to be educated and we have to be able to rapidly mobilize resources.”

The bottom line for the possibility of a real-life contagion, says Jones, is a frightening one. “Just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it can’t.” Which means you can panic, or you can hole up in your house, avoid the movie theater and wait until “Contagion” is released on DVD. Why expose yourself to germs if you don’t have to?

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