WILL OBAMACARE SAVE US FROM MEDICAL SCIENCE FICTION MALPRACTICE?
Have you had you flu shots lately? Well, you probably will after seeing Contagion, which was released while ads for flu shots have become omnipresent. The film begins with a caption “Day 2,” as Beth Emhoff (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) gets off a plane at the Minneapolis airport and dies within 24 hours. Her husband, Mitch Emhoff (played by Matt Damon), is flabbergasted, soon is quarantined in case he picked up the lethal virus, but he survives. Throughout the rest of the film, the medical science community works feverishly to contain the spread of something much worse than Swine Flu or H1N1. Glitches along the way contribute to suspense, including Jerry Springer-type episodes and Alan Krumwiede (played by Jude Law), a quack peddling a phony cure, but the main point appears to be to salute the competence of public health authorities. The Centers for Disease Control’s Dr. Ellis Cheever (played by Laurence Fishburne) handles the problem reasonably well, but medical scientists are the real heroes. At the end of the film, captioned “Day 1,” filmviewers see the source of the virus and how transmission began in a Hongkong restaurant from infected pork. Although he probably did not have the rise of the Tea Party in mind, director Steven Soderberg is to be congratulated for identifying why cuts in medical research by ax-wielding members of Congress could have catastrophic consequences. MH