Band Played On Contagion

In two years between 1918 and 1919, A pandemic of influenza swept mercilessly over the planet, killing millions which stood in its path. Miraculously, the exact origin of the pandemic is unclear. What is exceedingly clear, however, is that often the actions of man aided in the spread of the virus, whether due to inadvertent endangerment, close quarters, religious principles, or failure to recognize the true threat that influenza posed.

Anxieties and misunderstandings in relation to AIDS began when the homosexual community was affected. Consequently, people started to believe that it was only homosexuals would contract AIDS and accused them of the cause of the disease. The public was not worried until some people who were not homosexuals got the disease. Because of this, the attitude of the public changed into the fear that anyone could get AIDS since it was an STD. Numerous of people were misled by the actions of the government. An example in the film shows one woman who started to become sick after her blood transfusion. She always believed that it was because of the surgery, however, she actually she got AIDS. The doctors were aware but did nothing to notify her. This triggered fear because the government was aware that the AIDS prevalence was increasing and being spread yet

The movie, And the Band Played On, discusses the origin of the AIDS virus and how it spontaneously spread across the world. It used the Ebola disease to foreshadow the forth coming of another serious disease. The world was not prepared to handle such a contagious plague. Doctors around the world assumed that the first cases of the HIV virus to be just an abnormality of a certain disease, their carelessness of this matter was the start to the spread of this disease. Throughout this movie, it illustrates different points, such as the beginning of HIV, the misconceptions it gave, and the panic it aroused amongst doctors and the common people.

The same time of the gay culture boom the disease started also known as GRID (gay related immune deficiency dubbed by the media). The CDC curious

The pandemic struck the world and infected 1/3 of earth’s human population, killing over 50 million humans. The world’s top doctors have never witnessed anything of this killing magnitude besides the bubonic plague of 1348 but the transmissibility is of nothing they’ve ever seen in their lifetime or of recorded history. People abruptly became aware of the importance of health, and need of medicine and cleanliness.

Throughout the Age of AIDS film many topics that were related to AIDS were brought up that I did not know anything about before. I did not know that there could so many strings attached to a disease and have such an influence in people’s lives whether it was negative or positive.

Dr. Slutkin took this opportunity to apply his expertise on signs and behaviors of epidemic disease to potentially reverse what he saw as a “violence epidemic”. As he mentions, there are three steps to reversing contagious disease that are as follows: interrupting transmission (1), preventing further spread (2), and shifting the behavioral norms of the people (3). In the case of infectious diseases, you

Even though the character Robert Gallo appears later in the film, he plays a significant and frustrating role in ‘And the Band Played On’. Dr. Gallo is a well-known scientist who had at the time won many awards for succeeding in the medical field, so many in fact that it seemed as though he started to become a fame-hungry doctor. Instead of doing what was best for humans the only reason he took on researching HIV in the first place was because he was after the Nobel, and he never portrayed that he cared that there were people dying from this horrible disease. They may never have been able to stop the disease in its tracks, but they may have been able to raise awareness faster if it had not have been for Dr. Gallo’s self-centered ways and

The book The Great Influenza by John Barry takes us back to arguably one of the greatest medical disasters in human history, the book focuses on the influenza pandemic which took place in the year 1918. The world was at war in the First World War and with everyone preoccupied with happenings in Europe and winning the war, the influenza pandemic struck when the human race was least ready and most distracted by happenings all over the world. In total the influenza pandemic killed over a hundred million people on a global scale, clearly more than most of the deadliest diseases in modern times. John Barry leaves little to imagination in his book as he gives a vivid description of the influenza pandemic of 1918 and exactly how this pandemic affected the human race. The book clearly outlines the human activities that more or less handed the human race to the influenza on a silver platter. “There was a war on, a war we had to win” (Barry, p.337). An element of focus in the book is the political happenings back at the time not only in the United States of America but also all over the world and how politicians playing politics set the way for perhaps the greatest pandemic in human history to massacre millions of people. The book also takes an evaluator look at the available medical installations and technological proficiencies and how the influenza pandemic has affected medicine all over the world.

The pandemic caused a heavy outbreak of violence all over the universe. A man killed two innocent people trying to rob a convenience store. The failure of martial law to curb the eruption which caused the general to commit suicide when consumed by guilt. The fact that the military tried its hardest to censor the fact that they were burning the bodies of the dead and the deadly virus was even released even as far as to kill a radio show host talking about the disease. Despite the seeming post-apocalyptic utopia hinted at in The Stand, new types of monsters have been created, monsters who will be shaped by the as yet undetermined impulses and needs of their mutated psyches.

Due to the privatization of Korean companies and the neoliberal market structure, Korean citizens, especially males, couldn’t support their families and started jumping into the Han River as the economy declined. As a result, there were plentiful of bodies for the monster to devour; hence, the monster “fed on the skyrocketing number of suicides.” Additionally, Hsu discusses that The Host depicts the issue of medical outbreaks. He initially comments that movies besides The Host, such as Jaws, Outbreak, and Godzilla, associate with biological epidemics. Hsu then argues that westerners, especially Americans, focus on the wrong points when attempting to solve worldwide epidemics; instead of addressing fiscal imbalances for destitute countries, Americans obsess with discovering a cure through research, regardless if it is required or not.

And the Band Played On [1] is a 1993 Drama-Television film directed by Roger Spottiswoode about the early research of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980 's. The film portrays how powerful a society 's view has on a group when homosexuals suffer prejudice by society and view them as the cause of a new disease. The film greatly focuses on Dr. Don Francis, who previously contained the Ebola fever to prevent it from continuously spreading, as he joins the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate this new disease that is known to destroy the entire immune system and has initially been known to contaminate homosexuals. Problems arise when research on the disease has been found difficult for the CDC as they lack research funds from the government, but funding was not the only problem the CDC had with the government; another problem arose when Don felt as if the government (and society) wanted nothing to do with the homosexual community and that they did not want to be associated with “anything that involves the word 'gay '”. However, the gay community in San Francisco is divided on views of the disease and what should have been done about it as they argue on keeping a gay bathhouse (where most males were known to spread the disease). Investigations on the AIDS virus were slowed down when American Dr. Gallo angers French doctors that were researching about the virus, leading to a series of controversy about the discovery of the AIDS virus.

Contagion is a movie based on a deadly virus, MEV-1, which spreads around the world in a matter of days (Shamberg, Sher, Jacobs & Soderbergh, 2011). The premise is that the MEV-1 virus is spread person-to-person via airborne droplets produced by sneezes or coughs, as well as by viruses deposited on fomites, such as glasses, doorknobs, peanuts, and so on. The virus circles the globe in a matter of days, causing coughs, fevers and seizures as scientists from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scramble to identify the pathogen and develop a vaccine. MEV-1 is presented to the audience as a pandemic. During a pandemic preserving the functionality of society is a priority (Gostin,

The country through restrictions on movement to curb the spread of the disease got rendered unproductive in some sectors thus slowing the economic growth of India in both the Smallpox and Swine Flu pandemic. The cultural settings of the people got united through the pandemic since people united on one front as the population of a nation to fight the two pandemics without cultural barriers in mind (Weiss). The country responded quickly to the concerns of the people regarding the quality of their lives, and the government implemented measures alongside the global public health problems to support the fight against the

Since the beginning, humanity has overcome diseases that could potentially wipe out the human race. From earliest forms diseases such as measles to modern day pandemics such as AIDS, mankind has survived throughout history. Though diseases have plagued society it was only after the outbreak of the HIV virus in 1981 that brought to attention the dangers of incurable diseases. Before this time, with World War I and II, and the Cold War, public fear was based on the potential chance of a nuclear destruction of the planet. Since the outbreak of the HIV in 1981, public anxiety has been displaced from nuclear winter to that of microbial plagues. The enemy was now no longer a visible foe but that of an unknown contagion with no knowable cure. Recently in 2009, with the outbreak of the Swine Flu (H1N1) Virus public alert of the dangers of contagions increased. Science Fiction films since the outbreak of HIV have reflected the public fear of the unknown and unbeatable contagions. Films such as Outbreak (1995), Contagion (2011) and the recent World War Z (2013) have shown audiences a creative window of possible outcomes of an epidemic and what man would do in order to stop the