Bird Flu Movie Like Showing Air-Crash Film On A Plane

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry;  Public Health
Article Date: 09 May 2006 - 8:00 PST

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ABC will be showing a movie called 'Fatal Contact - Bird Flu in America'. Isn't this like showing the film 'Jaws' to a group of surfers, or 'Titanic' to passengers on a cruise ship, or 'The Exorcist' to a group of children just before they go to bed, or one of the many plane crash movies to passengers on an airplane?

The film shows total panic in the streets, piles of dead bodies being burned, whole city areas closed off, soldiers patrolling all over the place, barbed wire sectioning - total pandemonium.

The movie's aim, apparently, is to get Americans more prepared for a possible flu pandemic. More likely it will make millions of people anxious and raise the possibility that total panic will break out no matter how harmful or mild a pandemic may be.

The movie appears tonight on TV in the USA.

Public officials and health experts say the movie depicts a super-worse-case scenario, one that is ever so unlikely to happen anywhere in the world. Even the severe flu pandemic of 1918 - Spanish Flu - was dwarfed by the scenes and depictions in this movie.

Public health authorities, health care professionals and bird flu experts have expressed concern about the effects of this film. Even the US Department of Health and Human Services had to come out and explain some facts that movie watchers may not realise.

The film does not explain that a mutated H5N1 virus that could spread from human-to-human would probably be much less deadly to humans than the present one. The present H5N1 strain needs to get deep down into the human lungs to make a person ill. That is why humans cannot catch it easily and cannot spread it easily - an infected person who coughs hardly exhales any of the viruses because they are so deep down. For the virus to infect humans easily it needs to learn how to infect the upper-respiratory tract. It needs to mutate to do this. However, the upper-respiratory tract is much easier to treat - survival rates are much, much higher.

According to people who have seen the movie, it is both boring and so badly made as to be completely unscary. I hope this is really the case.

The movie supposes that the H5N1 bird flu virus strain mutates into a frightening bug. A man returns from Hong Kong and coughs after landing in Virginia. People panic, body bags galore, seniors starve and whole urban areas are closed off. As the pandemic grows the background sound effects are notched up a few decibels to get viewers more tense and excited.

It is one thing to make a movie about a situation after the event, such as Karakatoa or Titanic. But making a film, a deliberately sensationalist film, before a likely event, seems irresponsible and dangerous.

I fear that all this movie will achieve, will be:

1. Public fear and heightened anxiety.
2. A deluge of email spam offering 'cheap solutions' to the 'impending flu pandemic'.
3. More people willing to pay for these 'solutions'.

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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