![]() ![]() In fact, in the older film the prospect of the plague spreading across the country appears to be terrifying not because it threatens the lives of countless Americans, but because it would require a costly and presumably difficult mass-inoculation program. Most importantly, perhaps, the virus in "Outbreak" is stopped only when, in a stroke of pure luck, a cure is found but in Kazan's film a cure for the plague exists all along. In Panic in the Streets, three people die. In the new movie, it takes several divisions of the U.S. In Kazan's movie, however, the plague is contained by one man, a local public officer. Panic in the Streets, Elia Kazan's Oscar-winning film of 1950, has essentially the same plot as "Outbreak," this spring's big medical thriller: A deadly infectious disease has entered the United States from abroad and is threatening to sweep across the country. Whatever apocalyptic fantasies existed at the time were, by today's standards, tame. Polio had been conquered and, in one of history's greatest medical triumphs, smallpox was eradicated. What are the sources of this pessimism? A generation ago, American public health officials were talking openly about the impending end of all infectious disease. ![]() "What would we have done if this virus had occurred in humans? There are millions of us 'chickens' just waiting to be infected." Webster, one of the country's leading virologists, recently observed. "The chicken population in Pennsylvania is like the world as it is in this moment," Robert G. ![]() ![]() But there is also a sense of helplessness, a feeling of fatedness, as if we are all somehow in the same position today as the chickens of the Northeast were twelve years ago. In all of these books, movies and news reports there is a sense of fear: Americans have been well and properly frightened of viruses, after all, since the AIDS epidemic began fifteen years ago. We have been neglectful of the microbes and that is a recurring theme that is coming back to haunt us." And a well-received tome about infectious disease has also arrived from Laurie Garrett, a science reporter for Newsday, which is filled with gloomy quotations like this one, from the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg: "Are we better off than we were a century ago? In most respects we are worse off. Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, a terrifying tale of how close America came to a major epidemic of the Ebola virus in 1989, has been on The New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks. This spring a small outbreak of the African Ebola virus in Zaire drew virtually every major news organization to the hitherto unknown city of Kikwit. In the past six months alone, there has been a Hollywood film, a made-for-TV-movie, a cover story in Newsweek and countless news specials and media reports on the subject of killer viruses. The United States is in the grip of paranoia about viruses and diseases and what happened in Pennsylvania has acquired a certain symbolism. In 1983, people did not draw analogies between the health of domestic fowl and the health of the general public. The great Pennsylvania chicken epidemic went largely unnoticed at the time. By October, 17 million domestic birds-broilers, layers, turkeys, guinea fowl-from Pennsylvania down through Maryland and Virginia were dead. By late spring, chickens were collapsing within days of infection. As it spread, it replicated hundreds of millions of times, and as it replicated it underwent a critical mutation that turned it from a relatively benign virus into a killer. From there the virus spread, carried by truckers who go from farm to farm collecting eggs, selling feed or taking broilers to market. The virus was excreted in the ducks' feces, which meant that it got onto the ground and then onto the boots of a farmer, which is why in turn it soon found its way into the chicken barn. In the spring of 1983, a flock of wild ducks carrying a strain of avian influenza virus settled on a pond in a chicken farm in eastern Pennsylvania. This review of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance originally appeared in The New Republic in the July 17 & 24, 1995 issue. ![]()
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