In the time that I have been involved in medical science, few books that I have read have managed to get the science of infectious disease and epidemics right. (I was a lab assistant at age 16, so I’m talking about the last 20 years.) When I was in college, the movie Outbreak came out and greatly disappointed me. Sure, it was all good fun, but I’m the kind of person who looks at the minor details of the movie and maybe over-analyzes them too much. Outbreak was based on The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. The Hot Zone was a lot better at the finer details of what it takes to bring an epidemic — in this case a “zoonotic” or outbreak in animals that could “spill over” into the human population — under control using epidemiology, biology, and military capabilities. It wasn’t until I read Virus Hunter by CJ Peters that I got a much better idea of what it takes to respond to outbreaks of very scary diseases that are capable of wiping out the globe.
In fact, it was partly because of my correspondence with Dr. Peters that I decided to look into the Master of Public Health in Epidemiology program at GW. (Other influences came from the physicians I worked with at the lab, friends who said I had a knack for puzzles, and my own interest in infectious diseases.) Dr. Peters’ narrative of chasing Ebola from Reston, Virginia, to caves in Africa are amazing. If you want to get the real story of what it means to chase deadly pathogens and keep them under control, read Virus Hunter. If you want that same story romanticized and dramatized, read The Hot Zone. And if you want the same story to be turned into a mockery of real life, watch Outbreak.
I wouldn’t be attracted to a movie about an epidemic until Contagion. That movie hit all the right points on what would happen if a dangerous pathogen would come around to infect us and we had absolutely no defenses against it. (Like, zero defenses. No vaccines. No immunity. No drugs. Nothing.) Contagion does in a couple of hours what Outbreak would probably never do if it was a trilogy. From the initial response to the worldwide efforts to contain a zoonotic disease that has turned into a pandemic are all very accurate. I should know… I worked at the health department through the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic.
