A George Mason University professor is using Hollywood as a tool to teach what’s fact and what’s fiction in disease epidemics.
Julia Painter, a professor in George Mason’s Department of Global and Community Health, is offering a public screening of “Contagion,” a 2011 movie about a deadly, highly communicable virus and the investigators from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other health organizations who stop its spread.
The screening is in honor of National Public Health Week. It is from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, at the Johnson Center Cinema. Also as part of Public Health week, the College of Health & Human Services and Mason Recreation will co-host Who’s Walking Wednesday from noon to 1 p.m. at the Wellness Circle in front of Merten Hall.
Following the screening, Painter, a former CDC investigator, along with a panel of current and former investigators known as Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officers, will answer questions about their jobs, dispel Hollywood fiction and state the facts about real-life epidemics.
Painter completed the two-year EIS Fellowship at the CDC in June 2015 before joining Mason’s faculty.
“I’m always looking for ways to connect my students with people working in the field,” said Painter, who has made the screening a requirement for students in her Infectious Disease Epidemiology class.
Screening a movie offers an “interesting twist” to learning about epidemiology, while the discussion with CDC detectives is an added bonus for the students, she said.
Painter said the movie does get some of its facts right. While the mass hysteria is probably dramatized, people can actually get deadly diseases from animals. In “Contagion,” the fictional virus is transmitted to a human via bat and pig genetic material.
Some real diseases, like Lyme disease, are mainly transmitted from animal to human, Painter said. You can’t get Lyme disease from another human, but only from an infected tick.
Other diseases, like Ebola, originate in an animal host, but then can be passed from human to human like the fictional “Contagion” virus, Painter said.