The virus mutate.

[soft piano]

[screams]

Need that chamber scrubbed and ready.

Get that to the lab and call us CDC.

My name is Brian Amman.

[dings]

[Narrator] Brian is an Ecologist for the CDC,

specializing in infectious diseases.

Today I'm breaking down clips from movies and

television about pandemics.

I'd like to go record that I love all these movies.

I don't wanna come across as not a fan,

cause I am.

Small town outbreak from the movie Outbreak.

[Woman] Get the supplies, bring them in.

[Balding Man] What could be holding them up?

[Masked Man] I don't know.

[Balding Man] There they are now.

[Masked Man] Ray Fowler, Chief of Police.

This is Mayor Gaddis.

This one has so many flaws.

You see people shaking hands and that doesn't occur

in an outbreak area.

If there is some kind of a greeting,

it's usually elbow to elbow.

The PPE, Personal Protective Equipment,

is reasonably accurate.

We don't go into a place wearing helmets and

hazmat suits like that, but the PAPRs,

Air Purifying Respirators, that they have on their waists

are PAPRs that we have used in the past.

And the whole point of the powered air is that you have

positive pressure inside the head cover.

It's pushing air out and nothing can come in.

[baby crying]

[somber orchestral music]

So many.

They go from this, right here, with a full

hazmat suit and a helmet to guys with surgical masks,

You notice that she's not wearing any eye protection

and the guy directly behind her is.

So one of the little details that if this were

truly a filovirus outbreak, and this was an

isolation ward, they would all have a face shield

or eye protection.

Some gloves, some others without gloves.

It's total chaos, it's a mess.

That's pure Hollywood fiction.

Apparently they got it at a movie theater.

Smallpox, ER.

When did the rash start?

Three days ago.

[dramatic music]

Let me move you to a private room.

Can you take Adam? Follow me quickly.

What is it?

It's just a precaution. Excuse me!

Coming through here.

I think I got two cases of smallpox.

Oh my god.

Dun Dun Duh.

This is a tad on the far-fetched side because

smallpox was eradicated in 1980.

They have a vaccine for it now.

The CDC should have a stockpile of it.

All the smallpox that exists in the world

are in freezers in really secure labs.

Smallpox has been eradicated.

I heard the Russians had some on ice.

If a terrorist group got ahold of it--

Shut up, Jerry.

And for this to have actually have happened,

there would have to have been some kind of a

very, very serious breach in security.

Damn, I should've called in sick today!

We're gonna look at a couple of scenes from

Contagion and here's where they explain

the spread of the virus.

Here is a model of the virus and how

it attaches to its host.

The blue is virus and the gold is human

and the red viral attachment protein

and the green its receptor in the human cells.

It is available.

This computer software is able to form sort of a

3-dimensional image of the virus itself and

they can identify, through sequencing,

which parts of the virus are the receptors

where it binds to the human cell,

which parts are coding for certain proteins

that cause illness, or replication.

We've sequenced the virus and determined its origin

and we've modeling the way it enters the cells

of the lung and the brain.

Very accurate in terms of being able to pinpoint

certain areas of the genome that will have

certain effects on the human, or on the virus,

or even the cell that its infecting.

The virus contains both bat and pig sequences,

in the bottom right, and here you can see the

crossover event.

Bat. Bat. Bat.

Pig. Bat.

Yeah, I haven't heard the term crossover.

When the virus leaves the host and enters

an organism that's not a host, it's called spillover.

As the spillover events occur,

and with the multiple times this virus is replicating,

they're looking at these mutations as this thing

has been going along.

That's actually something they can do.

Animals spreading disease, Contagion

[dramatic music]

Very accurate. Especially the not hand washing thing.

There was an Ebola Reston outbreak in the Philippines,

at a pig farm.

We now have evidence that bats are a possible

host for Reston virus, flew to the pig farm,

and then it was found in the pigs

in a sample that was shipped to Plum Island.

Outbreak has a ton of problems.

Let's take a look at the scene with the monkey.

[foreboding orchestral music]

Here Betsy.

Here girl!

Betsy, come on! Here girl.

[monkey growls]

[monkey screeches]

That monkey deserves an Oscar.

I don't know where to begin.

What can I talk about?

The fact that that's a South American monkey that

they caught in Africa?

Well it's something at least maybe it's enough.

Part of my job at the CDC is to catch animals,

take samples, and test them for viruses.

The monkey is a Capuchin monkey, not found in Africa.

It would be some other green monkey, like a Vervet

or something else like that.

Here Betsy!

We wouldn't use a live person as bait,

let alone a child.

We actually study reservoir ecology, know their habits,

know their habitats, and know how to catch them.

You know, a monkey could technically bite someone

and have virus in the saliva, but generally speaking

they're so sick they kinda lay there and die.

You won't hurt her?

No, she's just gonna sleep for a little while.

In Contagion they really got it right,

here they did not.

Virus choosing the host, World War Z.

[intense orchestral music]

[zombie grunting]

He's infecting himself with another pathogen,

in hopes that this zombie would pass him by

or the virus in the zombie would pass him by.

[air lock decompressing]

[zombie snarls]

[door shuts]

[zombie screeches]

I like the idea

It gets to essentially the goal of a virus.

It wants to find a host that it can continue

to replicate its genetic material indefinitely.

That's not the question we're really asking, is it?

It's fiction, of course, because a virus

isn't gonna smell if a guy is sick,

be able to tell if this guy has cancer and therefore,

I don't want to infect that.

It can't choose

[sighs]

Global pandemic in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

[Reporter 1] Source of the virus was traced back to

drug testing done at Gen-Sys Laboratories

in San Francisco.

[somber orchestral music]

[Reporter 2] Showing signs of what's being dubbed

the Simian Flu.

[Reporter 3] The CDC is projecting a fatality toll

ranging from five million to as many as

150 million in the next six to eight months.

Theoretically, that's how things will happen.

Those red lines look kind of like, you know,

air travel pathways.

And then having interactions with individuals

within in airport, you can't avoid some kind of

personal space invasion.

It's a very plausible scenario.

[Reporter 4] A lab technician, now known as

Patient Zero, was accidentally exposed to

retrovirus ALZ-113.

In this clip they say Patient Zero

and that's not something that we typically use

in my field.

We tend to use what we call an Index Patient,

the individual that has first been identified

to have whatever virus it is or disease caused by

whatever virus it is.

This clip is about virus mutation,

from the television show House.

[Dr. House Voiceover] An infant picks up

a regular old measles virus and gets a rash.

He's extremely uncomfortable, has a wicked fever,

but he lives.

Well the animation is not extremely accurate.

Why do people lie to me?

Because the measles virus is an RNA virus

and that's a piece of DNA.

Can we get off my screw ups and focus on theirs?

[Dr. House Voiceover] Once every million or so times,

the virus mutates.

[snapping]

This explosion is not accurate.

Again?! Why are we getting hung up on what I did?

What happens is just sort of en error in the copying

of the nucleotide bases.

Instead of Dan having a fever and a rash,

the virus travels to his brain and hides for 16 years.

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis.

[dings]

Dawson's disease is an actual disease

and is basically sort of a leftover from having

a measles virus infection, so that part is true.

It's a sick brain.

Zombie infection, The Walking Dead

Vi, scan forward to the first event

[Vi] Scanning to first event.

There's no artificial intelligence at the CDC.

There are auditoriums at the CDC,

but they don't look like this.

The brain goes into shut down, then the major organs.

It invades the brain like meningitis.

Meningitis is more the condition,

when here they're making it seem like

some sort of a pathogen.

Scan to the second event.

I've never used the word event.

Just a shell driven by mindless instinct.

In severe accidents I would imagine that that's

a possibility. I think, technically,

you'd probably be declared brain dead.

What is that?

There'd be some electrical activity there.

I don't think you could see it like that.

What was that?

This looks like pure CGI to me.

We protected the public from very nasty stuff!

Infection in the hospital, the movie Outbreak.

[door slams]

Dr. Daniels?

Yeah.

There's something I think you should see. This way.

[suspenseful orchestral music]

A patient was admitted a week ago after a car accident.

He's had no contact with anyone in isolation.

You can stop that there.

Cause he just now had contact with

that individual in isolation.

Truly this guy should know better.

The guy pokes his head into the isolation ward,

says Doctor, pulls the guy out, they walk down

a clean hallway, directly into a patient's room.

With Ebola outbreaks, it would be an entire

disinfection process before you even came out of that.

Probably get sprayed down, some sort of a disinfectant,

take all the PPE off.

Possibly even shower, depending on where we were.

By doing this, they just walked in with filthy PPE

and potentially contaminated everything in the hallway

that they just walked down.

That would never happen.

It's airborne.

If you're dealing with a virus

that's similar to one that's already known

and you know how it's transmitted,

there would be a lot of things to go check

before you just say it's airborne.

I would be very suspicious.

Protective gear in Pandemic.

So have you, have you seen what's out there?

[Man] Not lately. I have a rational fear of dying.

This goes up and over. How's it feel?

Heavy.

This obviously the military and not CDC,

but the personal protective equipment is similar

to what we use.

We have coveralls as well, they're Tyvek.

They're impervious to water and other fluids.

And the face shield keeps you from sticking

your dirty fingers in your eye or in your ear.

You know, whatever the case may be.

This looks similar to what we wear in the field.

Now lets take a look at E.T.

[intense violin music]

Elliot thinks its thoughts.

No, Elliot--

Who's Elliot?

Elliot feels his feelings.

[spraying]

The part where they decontaminate,

before coming in, doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense.

You want to decontaminate coming out.

I've never been decontaminated with fog.

It's usually a chemical shower to make sure

that you are decontaminated.

I think you get information with the--

[overlapping directions drown out speaker]

These hoses would technically be connected

to some sort of a fan that would draw air through a filter

and put clean air into their hoods.

I don't see the hoses connected to anything,

not a respirator or anything.

Leave him alone, I can take care of him.

You can imagine,

I'm not saying it's real, there's no cover up,

an alien landing on the Earth

with its own set of viruses, that doesn't bother it,

but that could just wreak havoc on a community.

I would be there in a heartbeat because

that would be the coolest thing ever.

Just imagine what kind of neat viruses

you could find in an alien.

You might even get to name him,

that's how cool that would be.

The plague, in House.

[dramatic techno music]

Get that to the lab and call us CDC.

Tell them what?

That we have a patient with the plague.

Well, yeah. I mean, there's cases of plague,

it's mostly bubonic, throughout the Southwest.

But he's in there, knowing this patient has the plague,

and he takes out a syringe, that's been in the room

with the patient, and he pulls the cap off with his mouth,

and then he withdraws a sample and hands the sharp

to a colleague, which is something you don't do.

A needle or scissors or pointy forceps, even broken glass,

we call sharps.

Typically in the work we do in the labs,

sharps is handled pretty much just one person.

You'd never see a handoff of a needle like that.

So that part was bad.

Oh no. Where'd it go, where'd it go?

Here's another zombie movie, World War Z.

[snarling] [yelling]

Absolutely, getting blood in your mouth

is a way to get an infectious disease.

Bodily fluids coming into contact with mucus membranes.

[yelling] [gunshots]

Gerry, what?

Stay back!

[heartbeats] [yelling in background]

You notice that he stood on the edge,

he knows that he's been exposed

and a lot of people that work with these viruses,

myself included, if we have an exposure

we're not gonna keep it quiet.

We have a responsibility to the public.

We'll self isolate, we'll make sure that we're not sick,

and if we are sick we'll go into isolation.

We certainly wouldn't stand on the edge of a building

waiting to throw ourselves off, but you get the idea.

I got it in my mouth.

You're okay.

Decontamination in The Andromeda Strain.

We start decontamination and immunization

procedures now.

[Voiceover] Place the metal helmet

securely on the head.

[beeping]

You will notice a fine white ash on your body.

This is the outer epithelial layers of your skin

that have been burned away.

That's completely science fiction

and nobody in their right mind would let themselves

get cooked to the point where their

outer layer of epithelium is turned to ash.

I mean that's the definition of, you know,

a giant sunburn.

We faced quite a problem: how to disinfect the human body,

one of the dirtiest things in the known universe.

Hard on the taxpayers, isn't it?

The way we burn up uniforms.

In a lot of the clips we've reviewed today,

you see this decontamination process occurring

before they go into an infectious area

or into a lab, and it's always just the opposite for us.

You want to clean yourself off before you come out

into an area where the virus isn't.

Martial law, The Crazies.

They're checking for elevated temperatures.

[radio chatter]

Look, I'm a Sheriff she's a doctor.

[fast beeping]

[overlapping yelling]

We don't force people into treatment facilities,

we try to coax them in there,

but we don't have any regulatory authority

where we can arrest people and throw them in a cage,

or anything like that.

Aside from the separating the people part,

temperature is a good way to identify someone

with a fever and is a common practice.

One of the things that was incorrect here

was that they were actually sticking the thermometer

probe in the ear.

That would never happen.

You don't touch the individual,

because you're just transmitting from one person

to the next.

Could you just tell us what's going on?

What they use is handheld thermometers

and they point it at your temple,

and they hold it a few inches away,

and they'd get a reading that way.

[yelling] [fence clanging]

Wait! Wait!

No! Leave me! No!

Please.

[heavy breathing]

Keep it moving.

Please, don't. [screaming]

That's not correct.

She's being wheeled through,

there's seen bloody gurneys being passed by.

Isolation facilities are typically more of

a hospital care type of setting.

It's not gonna be under armed guard.

Is this really happening?

You wouldn't be left to let your imagination run wild

and there would be some explanation

as to what's going to happen and how you'll be cared for.

It's going to be alright. We're gonna be okay.

Let's look at a similar scene in I Am Legend.

[crowd talking] [machines beeping]

You're clear. Move ahead.

You're clear. You're cleared. Next.

Look, look, look.

[Woman] I'm not infected. I'd know it, I'm not--

Clear.

If there was some way to to detect an abnormality

that was a symptom of infection in the eye,

that that's why they'd be using that.

They're not touching the individual with the actual scope,

although their hands are all over people

and it's a giant crowd.

[beeping]

No good, no good.

I am Lieutenant Colonel Robert Neville.

I am ordering you to scan her again.

Scan her again!

[beeping] [baby crying]

It's clear.

This is obviously fiction.

After that we would've done many more scans

to make sure that she was in fact negative.

These kinds of scans, the temperature

and the eye thing that you saw in this clip,

can detect symptoms of infection.

They can't really, definitively say that you are infected.

What am I doing?

There are some mechanisms now that are more rapid

than just your traditional PCR,

that can turn around test results very quickly,

but they're not on site kind of things.

It's requiring some sort of a blood sample

that's taken back to a lab.

So simply just scanning them

can't tell you basically anything other than

they're feeling sick.

You'll always wanna up a scan like a temperature

with a blood test to identify that that person is either

infected with Ebola, Marburg, filovirus

or it's something else.

Zombie bite, The Girl with All the Gifts.

Do you wanna redose her?

Yes, yes Jean. That would be extremely helpf--

[glass shattering] [screaming]

[thump]

[stabbing]

[panting] [gasping]

[bones cracking] [grunting]

Yeah, that was quick.

You may have got a pretty decent size dose of virus

in whatever infection mechanism you just encountered.

[glass shattering] [screaming]

But it takes time for the virus to locate the target cell,

inject its own RNA or DNA into the cell,

and then disseminate throughout the body.

Generally speaking, it doesn't happen in 10 or 15 seconds.

[stabbing]

[panting]

The doctor picks up a shard of glass

and starts stabbing one of the zombies in the head,

presumably getting fluid in the cuts in her hand,

and she didn't get infected.

You can't have it both ways.

Or maybe she's one of those immune people.

Emphatically not.

Another zombie virus in 28 Weeks Later.

[soft music]

Kissing is a great way to get a virus, I mean,

there's no question about that.

[intense orchestral music]

[gasps] [vomits]

[grunts]

But, it again, wouldn't happen that quickly.

Incubation periods for some viruses can be days,

weeks, or even months.

I love the move but it's still fiction.

[frustrated yelling]

Here's more protective gear again in SNL.

[upbeat guitar music]

[laughter]

[Narrator] The Fault in Our Stars 2:

The Ebola in Our Everything.

No you wouldn't be able to have a relationship

having to dress that way all the time.

That would get old.

[upbeat guitar music]

She wants to have sex.

Hell nah.

Levels of infection, Pandemic.

There's Level Two, the hemorrhaging begins.

Level Three, patient secretes a black, necrotic blood

from prolonged internal hemorrhaging.

I've never seen an isolation ward look like this.

There is some level of security and

it's mostly to keep people out.

You keep people that are suspect cases separate

from people that are confirmed cases.

And here's Level Four. Look at these two.

They come together in love, but the first one to wake up

will kill the other one and not know why.

It's not anything like Level One, Level Two.

Help us.

For the most part, what you've got is a tent,

or let's say a hospital ward,

that's probably filled up pretty quickly

and you're not gonna have the luxury of having

that kind of space.

Robot lab in Resident Evil.

[upbeat futuristic music]

At the CDC there are robotic machines.

You'll have things that just it moves it under

and it dips and it moves it under and it dips

and that's the robot part of it.

We call it the The Robot but it's not, you know,

the Robby the Robot kind of thing,

it's more of an automated extraction machine.

[shattering]

Yeah, we don't use glass vials in the

high containment laboratories for that exact reason.

Although I suspect that was done intentionally.

Blood test from The Thing

We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood

and we're find out who's the Thing.

We'll do you last.

[screeching]

Man I hate it when my flamethrower doesn't work.

There's visible blood tests. The best example is malaria.

You can look at a blood sample under a microscope

and actually see the parasite infecting the cell.

To have an reaction like that though,

where the blood jumps out of the Petri dish

and runs away.

[screeching]

I mean, it's cool, but this is pure sci-fi.

[yelling] [flames roaring]

The lab in The Hot Zone.

No one goes into Level Four alone.

I'll be scanning you head to toe

for anything that could let contaminated particles in.

Alright, just breathe.

Breathe through it.

What are you doing?

I'm checking your pupils. Signs of panic.

Entry into an HCL, if we're talking to people

we usually say the HCL or the high containment lab.

If you were panicking like that putting the suit on,

chances are you would never go inside.

You've got a continual flow of fresh air

and it's not panic inducing.

Welcome to the Hot Zone.

No, we don't ever call it the Hot Zone. It's the lab.

I would like to point out though,

they didn't decontaminate going in.

That part they got right.

[dings]

[Narrator] Conclusion.

The idea of a pandemic can really bring out the fear

and the panic in people, but they tend to be

not nearly as uncontrollable as Hollywood makes it seem.

A lot of the work that the CDC does

is to make sure that disease outbreaks like this,

don't ever get to the stage of a global pandemic.

Viruses that you've seen in these clips

are basically Hollywood fiction

and the real life viruses that are out there

are hardly ever, if at all, as fast acting

as what you've just seen in these clips.

[applause]

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.