DARIUS RAFIEYAN, HOST:
Stacey...
STACEY VANEK SMITH, HOST:
Darius.
RAFIEYAN: ...Do you remember a movie that came out in 2011 called "Contagion"?
VANEK SMITH: I remember "Contagion."
RAFIEYAN: OK. You remember.
VANEK SMITH: It was very scary.
RAFIEYAN: Well, for those of you at home who perhaps...
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter).
RAFIEYAN: ...Don't remember this movie, it was about society struggling to cope with an outbreak of a mysterious new disease.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CONTAGION")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) They're calling out the National Guard. They're moving the president underground.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) People will panic.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Get away.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) It will tip over. The truth is being kept from the world.
VANEK SMITH: Whoa, man.
RAFIEYAN: Yeah. It's a lot.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter).
RAFIEYAN: And when I saw the movie, I was like - OK, this is dramatic and entertaining.
VANEK SMITH: Yeah.
RAFIEYAN: But I mean, this isn't realistic. Right? Like...
VANEK SMITH: Right. It's a movie
RAFIEYAN: ...Something like that couldn't actually happen in the real world. That's what I thought - until we met Dr. Anne Schuchat, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control.
ANNE SCHUCHAT: You know, I think when the average person sees that movie, you think it's over the top. But a lot of the scenarios that they play out are based on real infectious diseases.
RAFIEYAN: So we met Anne at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, and she's currently the deputy director. But for a couple of years, she was a member of the Epidemic Intelligence Service aka the disease detectives.
VANEK SMITH: That is a great job title.
RAFIEYAN: Basically, this is an elite squad of scientists who get deployed whenever some strange outbreak menaces public health. And it's their job basically to prevent a "Contagion"-style disaster.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CONTAGION")
KATE WINSLET: (As Dr. Erin Mears) Don't talk to anyone. Don't touch anyone. Stay away from other people.
VANEK SMITH: This is Kate Winslet in "Contagion." And she's playing a disease detective that was actually based on Dr. Anne Schuchat. And in fact, Kate Winslet even consulted with Anne Schuchat for the film.
SCHUCHAT: She asked me questions like, how would I do my hair on a outbreak? Would I wear makeup? What kind of shoes would I wear?
VANEK SMITH: Apparently, Anne says, you do not wear makeup during an outbreak. So now we know.
RAFIEYAN: Understandable.
VANEK SMITH: This is THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY. I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
RAFIEYAN: And I'm Darius Rafieyan. Today on the show, the dedicated officers of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, foot soldiers in the never ending battle against infectious disease and the only thing standing between us and a Hollywood-style pandemic disaster.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAFIEYAN: So this movie "Contagion," it was actually based on a real disease outbreak, one that started on February 3, 2003, when a man walked into the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital in Guangzhou, China. He had a bad cough and a high fever. His lungs were rapidly filling up with fluid. And everything the doctors tried just proved to be useless. They couldn't bring the fever down. They couldn't reverse the pneumonia. He just got worse and worse and worse. And what was even more troubling about this strange new disease, it was spreading. Within two weeks, 50 employees of the hospital were sick with the same stubborn illness.
VANEK SMITH: One of those employees, Dr. Liu Jianlun, was already showing symptoms when, a few weeks later, he checked into the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong. He was there to attend the wedding of his nephew, and he could not have known at the time that he was carrying one of the deadliest, most contagious diseases in modern history.
RAFIEYAN: This was the beginning of the SARS outbreak. SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, would go on to infect more than 8,000 people in 30 countries, killing over 800.
VANEK SMITH: And while the seeds of this global outbreak were being planted in Hong Kong, disease detective Anne Schuchat was at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, trying to make sense of all these reports she was getting about this mysterious fatal pneumonia that was spreading across the world.
SCHUCHAT: We had a whiteboard like that. And we had Vietnam, Toronto, Hong Kong - trying to understand, is this the same thing? Is it connected? What is it?
RAFIEYAN: The disease was spreading with alarming speed.
SCHUCHAT: We didn't know what the cause was, and so there wasn't a drug to treat that virus. There wasn't a vaccine against it.
RAFIEYAN: The Epidemic Intelligence Service sprang into action. More than a hundred disease detectives were deployed all over the world. Anne was sent to Beijing where, by far, the worst outbreak was occurring. By the time Anne arrived in the city, things were already out of control.
SCHUCHAT: The schools were closed. University was closed. Businesses were closed. I mean, the Chinese actually developed soap operas for all the people that were stuck at home. It was just like an abandoned city.
RAFIEYAN: Think about that for a second. This is Beijing, a city of 14 million people at the time and the capital of the world's second-largest economy, brought to a complete standstill.
VANEK SMITH: And similar scenes were playing out across Asia as fear of this disease began to spread faster even than the virus itself. Hotels and airlines saw a huge dip in bookings as people postponed vacations or canceled conferences. In fact, so many restaurants closed that it actually caused the worldwide price of fish to plummet. The economies of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan went from growing to shrinking almost overnight.
RAFIEYAN: Anne and her colleagues were essentially on an international manhunt for a microscopic serial killer.
VANEK SMITH: (Laughter). That's true.
RAFIEYAN: And honestly, the job doesn't seem that different from actual detective work. I mean, she was interviewing patients, testing blood samples, poring over medical records, trying to trace all the points of contact. And eventually, the search led back to Dr. Liu and the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel.
VANEK SMITH: It was there that he got into an elevator with a Chinese-American businessman en route to Hanoi and a 78-year-old grandmother from Toronto. It is believed that it was a sneeze from Dr. Liu in that elevator that spread this virus, turning everyone there into unwitting hosts for SARS.
RAFIEYAN: And two weeks later, when Dr. Liu was taking his last labored breath in the isolation ward of a Hong Kong hospital, the pandemic he'd unwittingly set in motion had already spread to seven different countries.
Meanwhile, Anne was in Beijing watching as society was crumbling around her as all of these frantic local health officials were looking to her like - how do we stop this thing? You're the expert.
SCHUCHAT: We had to try to institute control measures.
RAFIEYAN: But they didn't have a drug to treat this disease. I mean, there was no vaccine to prevent it. So they had to fall back on the most tried and true disease control measure ever developed. Find out who has the disease, and isolate them. But of course, this is Beijing, so it was a big job.
VANEK SMITH: Disease screening checkpoints were set up across the city. Teams of medical workers were roaming the streets with thermometers, taking everyone's temperature they ran across just trying to ferret out anyone with a fever. Entire hospitals were devoted to just treating SARS patients. And when they filled up - when that wasn't enough room, the government mobilized the military to build a 1,000-bed quarantine hospital in an empty field in less than a week.
RAFIEYAN: And ultimately, it worked. I mean, less than a month after Anne arrived in Beijing, the World Health Organization declared the city safe. And despite the fact that SARS killed 800 people, this is by all accounts a success story. A timely, coordinated response averted what could have been a much bigger disaster.
And at one point in our interview, I made an offhand remark to Anne, something to the effect of - you know, wow, isn't it great that we've got all these infectious diseases under control and now we don't have to worry about it? And everyone in the room visibly tensed up.
SCHUCHAT: We may think we'd been ready for the one that was going to stop society and that a future pandemic wouldn't be life-altering. You really need to recognize that when a pandemic occurs with a severe strain, the availability of modern medicine and vaccines and antivirals and stuff is not such that it's necessarily all going to be slam dunk, everything's fine.
RAFIEYAN: Anne pointed out to us that just last year, which was, you know, a bad flu season but by no means a pandemic, 80,000 Americans died of the flu.
VANEK SMITH: That is more than drug overdoses, more than car crashes.
RAFIEYAN: And to me, this highlights the fact that we don't really think about infectious diseases when we go about our day-to-day lives.
SCHUCHAT: We just take for granted what we don't see, and effective prevention is pretty invisible.
VANEK SMITH: And prevention doesn't stop just because the disease is contained. Eventually, after years of searching, scientists found the source of the SARS virus - actually where it began. And it was a colony of horseshoe bats in a cave in southern China, more than 800 miles from where Dr. Liu first came into contact with it.
RAFIEYAN: I mean, the bug that brings civilization to its knees could, at this very moment, be brewing in the belly of a bat somewhere in the Chinese countryside.
VANEK SMITH: OK, Darius, have got to stop Googling things (laughter).
RAFIEYAN: Have I told you about the 1918 Spanish flu...
VANEK SMITH: Yes.
RAFIEYAN: ...Because we...
VANEK SMITH: Yes, you have (laughter).
RAFIEYAN: I want to give a very special thanks to Maryn McKenna. Her book "Beating Back The Devil" provided a lot of really amazing details about the SARS epidemic. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADRIAN QUESADA, DUSTY HENDRIX, JEFFREY W. WADE AND RUBEN AYALA'S "BLACK WAXPLOITATION")
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