Cross posted from Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog.
Flu season is approaching, which means it’s almost time to break out the vaccines and hand-sanitizer. But another method of preventative care may be a dose of Warner Brothers’ new thriller Contagion, out this weekend in theaters across North America.
The film begins innocuously enough with the sound of a cough in the darkness. But when the cougher herself, played by Hollywood starlet Gwyneth Paltrow, is dead within the next five minutes, you can’t help but pay close attention to who is coughing on whom and who is touching whom for the rest of the film — and, maybe, for the rest of flu season.
Steven Soderbergh directed Contagion, and, like his Academy Award-winning 2000 film Traffic, the film follows the weaving paths of many people as they try to survive this viral epidemic. Ellis Cheever, deputy director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention played by Laurence Fishburne, coordinates the scientists, media and public as the virus spreads from one major metropolis to another. He sends epidemiologist Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) to Minneapolis — where Paltrow’s character, Beth Emhoff, died after returning from a business trip in China — to try to stop the virus in its tracks. Meanwhile, World Health Organization agent Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) heads to China to trace the virus’s origins at the same time as virologists and epidemiologists (Elliott Gould, Jennifer Ehle, Demetri Martin) work to identify the virus and find a cure back in the US. Rounding out the cast is a muckraking blogger with a penchant for conspiracy theories, Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who hocks an herbal remedy to his online readership, and lastly, standing in for the normal guy trying to save his family, is Mitch Emhoff, the husband of Paltrow’s character and played by Matt Damon.
Despite the celebrity-laden cast, the real star of the film is the virus itself, dubbed MEV-1 and designed by the film’s scientific consultant Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist and director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity in New York.
Read the rest of this post at Spoonful of Medicine.
Image: Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Lyle Haggerty (Bryan Cranston) in the thriller ‘Contagion’. Photo by Claudette Barius