How does the virus mutate in contagion

Along the way, widespread chaos ensues, several A-list actors have chances to be both tragic and heroic, and the world is saved in the end by intrepid scientists who whip up a vaccine in less than six months.

Yet the least plausible part of the scenario is the very beginning, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University. “I’m not entirely sure why it would be Gwyneth Paltrow who would be so important other than the fact that she’s a movie star,” he says. “In reality, something that would have been that infectious, you would expect there to be rumblings in local populations.” A factory worker at the pig farm, for instance, would be a more likely patient zero than a jet-setting Western business executive.

MEV-1 is based on a real pathogen, called Nipah virus, which causes respiratory symptoms, encephalitis, seizures, and kills 45 to 90 percent of its victims. Nipah has a reservoir in bats and has sickened hundreds of people in Malaysia and Bangaldesh. But it usually doesn’t transmit between humans very well, says Pramila Walpita, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, who is developing a vaccine for Nipah.

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