Imagined immunities

1 The image of the desolate African camp decimated by an unknown hemorrhagic virus was already a stock scene of journalism and fiction when Wolfgang Petersen’s film Outbreak opened with it in 1995. Journalistic photographs and accounts and novelistic depictions had begun to burn it into the American collective consciousness, as they marketed and managed the scientific concern about emerging infections. Petersen’s film combined that with many other stock images to dramatize the outbreak story and facilitate its emergence in popular culture. It offered the audience the visceral experience of the graphic description—and the particular horror—of a person’s being liquefied by a hemorrhagic virus. And it rehearsed a scenario in which the outbreak of a horrific disease could travel the routes of a global economy to make a small California town almost (but not quite) as expendable to the U.S. military as an African camp—its inhabitants almost becoming, in the icy words of Donald Sutherland’s marvelously sinister character, General McClintock, acceptable ‘‘casualties of war.’’ The credits open with a quotation from Joshua Lederberg calling viruses ‘‘the single biggest threat to man’s continued dominance on the planet.’’∞ The epigraph from Lederberg, a geneticist and Nobel Laureate, conferred the sanction of science on the formulaic story about how an Ebola-like hemorrhagic virus might chart a course through the global village from Zaire to Boston and California, and it helped to make the film part of the alarm that Lederberg and his colleagues sought to sound at the waning of the twentieth century. In the early years of the Cold War the U.S. military had treated anticipated epidemics, which they feared would follow a germwarfare attack, as a national priority, but subsequent decades had dulled that threat. The miracle of antibiotics and other medical victories (such as the eradication of naturally occurring smallpox in 1977) seemed to have