14 DAY TRIAL // Biologists and epidemiology experts warn the general public that the presentation that infectious diseases get in Hollywood feature films, or in TV shows, is widely exaggerated, and scientifically incorrect. That is, in most movies capitalizing on people's fear of diseases, pathogens are depicted as infecting people within a matter of minutes, and then spreading like wildfire through the general population. While this also happens in reality, the patterns of infection are different, and the spread can be contained more efficiently.
“The way contagion is spread or the time in which it takes contagion to spread is greatly exaggerated in most fictional depictions of disease. I have been watching '24' this season, and they have a 'prion variant' that begins to affect someone within hours. Prion infection takes decades to produce symptoms, so these types of things, when seen multiple times in multiple formats, can blur public thinking,” Temple University in Philadelphia (TUP) public health researcher Sarah Bass told LiveScience.
She said that movies such as “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later,” together with TV shows like “24,” had the ability to distort public perception on epidemics, and could cause significant amounts of fear and panic when such infections indeed appeared. On the other hand, media outlets, in search for the sensational, tend to display ominous headlines, which only serve to further amplify the general panic. Under these circumstances, scientists appearing on TV shows and stating the objective facts seem to be downplaying the magnitude of the outbreaks, when, in fact, they are only showing the real span of an epidemic.
In addition, a lot of people fear the very authorities that are supposed to protect them in such circumstances. That is to say, in zombie horror movies, government agencies are often depicted as serving another agenda than that of the people, and as being cruel and merciless. In many Hollywood productions, they leave people for dead, enforce military quarantines on entire areas, and even drop nuclear bombs to contain a situation (“Outbreak,” “I Am Legend,” “Resident Evil,” and so on).
“I know there's been a lot of talk radio saying, 'Let's close our borders,' but I think most people have been trained to say, 'Let's focus on the virus rather than the victims of the virus,'” Rutgers University Medical Historian Janet Golden added, and also said that movies played a major role in shaping the public perception of certain diseases. She also mentioned the role of Hollywood at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS outbreak in the US, in the early 1980s. “I think some of the early HIV/AIDS films, TV and plays did a good job of saying let's not demonize people. Let's get to the issue of what can we learn and what can we treat,” she explained.