I recently watched both the movie Outbreak and the movie Contagion. Both movies were incredibly entertaining. Outbreak focused on a virus that the military weaponized and covered up. They released the virus in an African village to watch the effects they then destroyed the village to make sure no one would know that the virus existed. The military failed to contain the virus and it got out and lived within a population of monkeys. This population was discovered by scientists and later brought back to the United States. Someone trying to make money from the virus smuggled one of the mokeys out of a lab and the virus mutated and became airborne once it got transferred to a human host. So then it gets out and an entire town gets infected and quarantined. They eventually make a vaccine and the townspeople are saved. Contagion is a little bit more extreme. It follows a virus that was brought from china back to the States and all over the world. It managed to infect 1 in 12 people around the world killing a vast majority of them. The movie focuses on how society would essentially crumble while everyone worries about getting infected with an incredibly infectious pathogen. At the end of the movie it shows a cut scene of how the outbreak started. Bats harboring a virus transferred it to pigs. The pigs then were slaughtered and sent out to be eaten. The chef preparing the pig at a bar in China didn’t wash his hands and was interrupted in the middle of preparing it. The chef then walks out and shakes hands with a girl who later touches her face, then comes in contact with many people traveling to many parts of the globe. It is incredible how fast a competent pathogen can spread when the perfect storm of scenarios happen.
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