WEDNESDAY, May 10, 2006 (HealthDay News) -- Fatal Contact: Bird Flu in America, a made-for-TV film that experts say played fast and loose with both biology and reality, has prompted U.S. health officials to note that the production was little more than a flight of fancy in the Hollywood tradition.
According to ABC, which broadcast the movie Tuesday night, it was a dramatization of a worst-case scenario. "It is a Hollywood account that exaggerates and condenses events to create an exciting story," the network said in a statement.
Scenes of dead bodies heaped in trucks as terrified survivors huddled together under quarantine undoubtedly alarmed many viewers.
To assuage any lingering fears, the network that same evening used its late-night news program Nightline to present what it described as "the difference between fact and fiction." Guests included such health heavy hitters as Michael Leavitt, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"It was not a factual presentation of a real-life situation," Leavitt said.
Meanwhile, health officials in several states, including California, New York, North Carolina and Texas, were also taking steps to reassure residents that the movie was not a realistic depiction of bird flu's current level of threat. They were also using the opportunity to educate people about steps they can take to protect themselves in the event of a real flu pandemic, which many health experts say is overdue.
Scientists are distancing themselves from the film. However, some experts believe that scientists may also be partly to blame for the climate of fear that made the movie possible.
Dr. Marc Siegel, a clinical associate professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine and author of Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic, said he sees the film as purely a money-making venture that played on worries that had already been created. Without this preexisting fear, no one would have watched the film, he said.
"How come ABC thinks they can make a lot of money with a TV movie on a topic that is supposed to be so super-serious?" Siegel asked. "I think it's, in part, because so many of our scientists and people in the media have been doom-saying on this, that they have created a terrain that could be exploited via fictionalization."
In the film, millions of Americans were killed by a bird-flu pandemic, with bodies piling up so fast that dump trucks were used to cart them away. Survivors were quarantined behind barbed-wire fences.
The film opened in Guangdong, China, with workers destroying dozens of infected birds. At the same time, a husband from Richmond, Va., returned home from a trip abroad and hugged his wife. In this way, the disease spread though human contact (something the real bird flu can't do -- yet, anyway) and quickly reached America's shores. As the pandemic spread, rioting, looting, panic and hysteria ensued, with gas prices soaring to $100 a gallon.
Further fueling the panic, food and medicine were in short supply
But Leavitt, speaking on Nightline, noted that "we do have optimism that vaccines will be available" in the event of a bird-flu outbreak. However, "Because we have to create a vaccine that is crafted to the individual virus, it will be at least six months before we have a vaccine. We don't have the 300 million courses necessary to give every man, woman and child a course of the vaccine," he acknowledged.
Fauci told the Nightline audience that the way the virus evolved in the movie was unrealistic. "Literally overnight, it went to spectacular efficacy in going from human to human," he said. "Sure, in biology everything is possible, but that's an extremely unlikely scenario. When people wake up in the morning after seeing the ABC movie, they shouldn't be assuming that we are one mutation away from that movie. But what would be unfortunate would be that it scared the heck out of people in a nonproductive way," he added.
In truth, the H5N1 strain of bird flu hasn't reach the United States. It has spread from Asia to Africa and Europe and has killed or led to the slaughter of more than 200 million domesticated birds, primarily poultry. An estimated 113 people have died from bird flu, most of them in Asia, and most of them lived close to or worked closely with infected birds.
Fearing that the film could lead to misunderstandings, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a "viewer's guide," which noted that: the movie was not a documentary; there is no bird flu pandemic in the world; H5N1 is a disease of birds; and the film highlighted the importance of community planning.
Still, NYU's Siegel said: "We really shouldn't be learning our public health from TV movies. When you talk about something in emotional terms, you begin to believe it's going to happen."
Another health expert said he agrees.
"When art imitates life, it does so very selectively," said Dr. David L. Katz, an associate professor of public health and director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine. "The ABC movie about bird flu was intended to entertain primarily, educate only nominally and as a byproduct. The depiction of flu pandemic in the movie was intended to maximize viewership, not knowledge."
"Perhaps the movie provided a service by showing some people how bad the 'worst' could be, albeit with certain inaccuracies," he added. "To the extent that cultivates public support for flu preparations, it is potentially a good thing."
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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets the record straight about the bird flu film.
