16 Aug 2016
How scientifically accurate is Hollywood film Contagion?
National Science Week provided the perfect opportunity for scientists to view Hollywood blockbuster Contagion and argue over its authenticity.
But Doherty Institute scientists, University of Melbourne Associate Professor Katherine Kedzierska and the Royal Melbourne Hospital's Dr Julian Druce, and ARC Centre of Excellence in Bio-Nano Science researchers, Dr Angus Johnston and Associate Professor Matthew Kearnes, were in agreement that it was a close depiction of how an infectious disease outbreak would unfold.
The screening, held at the Doherty Institute’s, was followed by a panel discussion about the scientific accuracy and similar outbreaks that have occurred in reality.
Dr Druce, head of the Virus Identification Laboratory, compared the virus depicted in Contagion to Ebola most recently and the SARS outbreak in 2003.
In approximately eight months, there were just over 8000 cases of SARS in southern China, with 774 deaths reported across 37 countries.
“SARS was unusual. There were so many people who were super spreaders, spreading the virus to a lot of people. It was also highly contagious and a respiratory illness, similar to that in the film,” Dr Druce said.
The question was raised about what research was currently being done about understanding what the immune system’s role was in fighting viruses.
Associate Professor Katherine Kedzierska, head of the Human T Cell Laboratory, said in the case of Spanish Influenza, a ‘cytokine storm’ in the immune system led to inflammation, which flooded the lungs and caused many deaths.
“In 2013, the new avian virus caused a similar cytokine storm. There are certainly a lot of people trying to understand how we can develop new therapies to reduce the inflammation that causes severe disease,” she explained.
The panel agreed that one of the glaring inaccuracies in the film was the time it took for the immune system to mount a response to a live attenuating vaccine.
“With any virus that we haven’t seen before, it takes at least 10 days or two weeks for T-cells to mount an immune response. For vaccines, it takes three to four weeks, a much longer time frame than depicted in the movie,” Associate Professor Kedzierska said.
While it was easy to pick the incorrect aspects in Contagion, it was unanimous that while the science was compressed, the film was one of the most accurate of the genre.
“There was a lot of information given about how viruses were spread; the film did well to educate the audience. The roll out of health services, how they set up the triage centre and broke down populations who were highly symptomatic versus less symptomatic were reasonably accurate,” Dr Druce concluded.