What is Contagion ?

At Argonne National Laboratory, emergency preparedness analysts like Dan Walsh work with public health departments to make sure they could quickly respond to a Contagion-like outbreak. We asked Walsh what he thought of the portrayals in the movie.

"Health officials struggle to control the media narrative about Ebola," read a headline in the Washington, D.C., publication The Hill a few days ago. The words were atop an article arguing that careful Obama administration pronouncements about the limited threat posed to most Americans by Ebola were being drowned out by "wall-to-wall coverage of Ebola" on cable news networks.

The 1918 pandemic was commonly known as the Spanish flu, but it did not start in Spain. (Many believe it began in Kansas.) The Spanish took the rap because their king, Alfonso XIII, got sick, and because their nation was neutral in World War I and allowed an uncensored press to report on the flu.

The word "quarantine" comes from the Italian word "quarantina," meaning a period of 40 days. During the Black Death, the city of Venice required ships suspected of carrying disease to sit at anchor for 40 days before they could land.

The 1918 flu reached far corners of the globe. In the Fiji islands, it killed 14 percent of the population in 16 days. In the remote eastern Canadian town of Okak, more than 200 of the 266 residents died. The virus struck Okak so quickly that citizens could not provide for their many dogs; the hungry animals invaded their homes, attacking both the living and the dead. One survivor, the Rev. Andrew Asboe, armed himself with a rifle and reportedly killed more than 100 dogs.

Mary Mallon was an Irish immigrant in New York City in the early 1900s. She was by all accounts a talented cook.

Mallon also was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. After she infected more than 20 people, with one dying, she was isolated in a hospital for nearly three years. Officials didn't know what to do with her, so she was given a second chance. Mallon, who likely never believed health officials who said she was infected, went back to cooking. Two more people died.

This time, Typhoid Mary, as she became known, was given what amounted to a life sentence. She lived out her days — 23 years — isolated in a one-room cottage on an island in the East River.

When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 14th century, learned men believed it was caused by an Italian earthquake or an alignment of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. No one knew the disease was spread by rats and fleas. A leading French doctor warned that people could become infected simply by looking at someone who was sick.

During World War I, the U.S. government considered venereal disease to be a formidable enemy threatening troop readiness. Taking the offensive, authorities in the U.S. incarcerated about 30,000 suspected prostitutes and shut down red-light districts.

That included New Orleans' famed Storyville, described by one official as "24 blocks given over to human degradation and lust." New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman complained about the crackdown, saying, "You can make prostitution illegal in Louisiana, but you can't make it unpopular."

Nobody calls "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" a documentary, but the British comedy's "Bring out your dead" scene rings true.

During the European plague, when the bodies were piling up, funeral services and processions were prohibited. Instead, corpse-removers gathered up the dead in carts to get rid of them quickly.

English sweating sickness, which caused profuse sweating and sometimes led to a rapid death, remains a mystery more than five centuries later. After raging for more than 60 years, the last major outbreak of the disease in England was recorded in 1551. Then the "English sweat" simply vanished, with its cause never established.

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas was identified as "Patient Zero," who brought the virus to North American cities in the 1970s and early '80s. But some believe Dugas' role was exaggerated, and there is evidence that the virus was on this continent well before his travels. Tissue from a teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969 was preserved for study and was later found to contain the AIDS virus.