Public health crises in popular media: how viral outbreak films affect the public’s health literacy

Abstract

Infectious disease epidemics are widely recognised as a serious global threat. The need to educate the public regarding health and safety during an epidemic is particularly apparent when considering that behavioural changes can have a profound impact on disease spread. While there is a large body of literature focused on the opportunities and pitfalls of engaging mass news media during an epidemic, given the pervasiveness of popular film in modern society there is a relative lack of research regarding the potential role of fictional media in educating the public about epidemics. There is a growing collection of viral outbreak films that might serve as a source of information about epidemics for popular culture consumers that warrants critical examination. As such, this paper considers the motivating factors behind engaging preventive behaviours during a disease outbreak, and the role news and popular media may have in influencing these behaviours.

Social Responses to Epidemics Depicted by Cinema

“…For example, in the Sherlock Holmes story The Giant Rat of Sumatra (not penned by Conan Doyle), Professor Moriarty prepares to import plague to Britain by acquiring infected rats from Southeast Asia (5). Accordingly, in some recent Hollywood films, the direction of disease movement is typically east to west, or at least from developing to developed countries, and plays on common stereotypes, including concepts of orientalization and othering (4,22). The film Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh), although widely lauded for its accurate depiction of the mechanisms of disease transmission and epidemiology, can be seen to neatly fit within Wald's outbreak narrative framework, in which a pathogen is brought into the developed world after contact with migrants and visitors from lesser developed areas (4,6).…”

“…Accordingly, in some recent Hollywood films, the direction of disease movement is typically east to west, or at least from developing to developed countries, and plays on common stereotypes, including concepts of orientalization and othering (4,22). The film Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh), although widely lauded for its accurate depiction of the mechanisms of disease transmission and epidemiology, can be seen to neatly fit within Wald's outbreak narrative framework, in which a pathogen is brought into the developed world after contact with migrants and visitors from lesser developed areas (4,6). Evie Kendal noted that the virus that hit the United States in Outbreak (1995, Wolfgang Petersen) was thought to have originated in Africa, whereas in Contagion and The Crazies (1973, George Romero), the disease originates in Asia (4).…”

“…Although films traditionally deal sensitively or realistically with the topic of HIV/AIDS (e.g., Dallas Buyers Club, Philadelphia, And the Band Played On, Kids), often through melodrama, fewer films have dealt with other epidemic diseases, as either direct subject material or background context. Of these more realistic or semirealistic films about epidemics, scholarly literature has focused on the inadequacy of capturing the correct science behind disease transmission, spread, and illness (2)(3)(4) or anachronistic characters in films concerning historical epidemics (5). Notwithstanding broader discussions of society-disease interaction in the media (6), the social responses to various diseases portrayed in films have been discussed less frequently.…”

“…In this article, we bring together a sample of films that we manually selected from a consolidated database of epidemic-related films built from assorted scholarly literature and catalogs (2,4,5,(7)(8)(9). This database was supplemented by accessing "Films about viral outbreaks" on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.…”

“…We manually selected the films and eliminated those that corresponded to the 3 broad categories mentioned above (i.e., those that are overly fantastical, not based or loosely based on an actual epidemic disease) and focused on films that pay explicit attention to social responses to disease (rather than being a peripheral backdrop to an unrelated story). Furthermore, the absence of comprehensive indexing of films containing narratives around epidemics makes construction of a systematic sample impractical (4).…”