Fatal Contact Mixed Bag

I just watched the ABC attempt to dramatize the bird flu, Fatal Contact: Avian Influenza. There were some good parts to the movie but a lot of Hollywood nonsense that was hard to ignore.

The good parts: The movie did a pretty realistic job of portraying the impact of a flu pandemic replete with a lack of a vaccine, shortages of anti-virals, the effect on the economy and availability of goods, and ham handed government responses.

Oh, yeah, and a ticker on the screen kept showing an increasing toll. The death toll climbed up to 24 million but used individual stories to dramatize the toll. Numbers like 24 million deaths are just too large to really grasp. So, it was a good strategy to focus on the small deaths of individuals to carry the emotional weight.

The bad parts:

But being it was a major television studio’s attempt to portray an issue with scientific and political veins, there were some really ludicrous elements. Towards the end of the program, the tide starts turning when neighborhoods start self-organizing to help each other. What it is they do exactly, to replace failed public health services or failed food and fuel delivery systems, for instance, is never really explained.

Shades of the federal government’s own pandemic readiness plans. The updated report released in early May says: "Local communities will have to address the medical and nonmedical impacts of the pandemic with available resources." While there are naturally limits to what the federal government can do to respond to an influenza pandemic, it has a huge role in helping sustain health systems, and vital economic services, as well as other functions. And, the local response that’s needed, particularly in the health services, has been eviscerated by continued federal funding cuts over many years.

If you want local communities’ health care system to be able to respond to a flu pandemic, you’d better be funding a public health system and be sure there are plenty of hospital beds available.

I’m heading off to work soon, but I’ll get some more numbers up here about the decline of the public health system in the near future.

Another really ridiculous piece of this movie was the killer flu strain at the end of the show. After the 1^st wave of illnesses and deaths a new strain pops up in Angola. The CDC investigative team flies out to assess and finds that the virus kills 100% of its victims. The final shot cuts away to a flock of birds flying across the sky (presumably heading to your town!)

First of all, an influenza virus that developed a perfect kill ratio would burn itself out before it could spread far. The flu is effective because it makes most people sick but not so sick they can’t spread the virus around. If all your victims drop dead, your spread will be self-limiting. That’s one of the reasons influenza is a more effective virus than say Ebola.

Secondly, a flu virus that develops human to human transmission is going to spread by that pathway. Forget the birds; it’s now a human virus. The movie should’ve closed with someone getting on an airplane headed for New York.

All in all, though, the movie was better with the science than The Day After handled global warming.

Was it designed to scare you? Yes. Should avian influenza scare you? Yes.

One of these days I’m going to get around to posting the article I wrote in 1997 about the coming flu pandemic.