Blog Assignment #7

1. In Contagion, the main character's name is Beth Emhoff. She's a woman that has just returned to Minnesota from Hong Kong and becomes sick. Although she initially dismisses her illness as a result of jet lag, she is found dead two days after she reaches home. The doctors tell her husband that they have no idea what has caused her death, and pretty soon, lots of people, starting with her immediate family (except for her husband, who was for some reason immune to it), start to show the same symptoms that she had before she died. A pandemic begins and the remainder of the movie involves the doctors, specially the American CDC and the World Health Organization, trying to contain this microbe and the entire society starts to collapse as people grow more and more paranoid with fear. In the end, everyone was killed.
2. An outbreak is a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease. An outbreak investigation is when people search for the source of the outbreak. Isolation is the social separation of a person who has or is suspected of having a contagious disease.A quarantine is a state, period, or place of isolation in which people or animals that have been exposed to infectious or contagious disease are placed. In Contagion, there was obviously an outbreak of some kind of lethal disease. Doctors attempted to investigate this outbreak by tracking down people who died in unusual or unexplainable ways, because this disease was something that killed people in ways that were not understood. In addition to this, those who were discovered to be infected by the disease were isolated and quarantined; they were put into large places where they would not infect anyone else in society, such as a large stadium of some sort.
3. Health agencies would have been better prepared if they had an already decided location to use in case of an emergency such as a pandemic. If they didn't have to waste time searching for an appropriate location, they'd be able to isolate infected people much more quickly and therefore have more time to figure out the source of the disease. In addition to this, perhaps people with unexplained illnesses should be quarantined earlier rather than later, just in case, and at least until the illness is explained or proven not to be contagious. The small inconvenience it may cause that individual patient is probably worth the safety of the entire population.