Jude Law’s “Contagion” character, a rogue blogger with faith in a homeopathic remedy and an inclination to stick it to the Centers for Disease Control, warns against trusting the official word of authority figures. Not after the Wall Street collapse, not after Katrina, he exhorts. Audiences will likely identify with this sentiment, because it says a lot about what it has been like to live on the planet Earth in recent years. But the film actually puts a lot of faith in the experts, and one authority figure happened to play a vital role in the production. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, one of the world’s foremost specialists in microbe hunting and the director Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, was used as a consultant to the filmmakers to ensure the accuracy of everything from Paltrow’s foam-mouthed seizure on the kitchen floor to the pronunciation of “morphologically pathognomonic.”
     Dr. Lipkin tells PLANET that he is 99.98% satisfied with the film’s attempts at realism – “like Ivory Soap,” he says. On the whole, he is thrilled with it on the basis that, “We’ve gotten across the message of the risk of Zoonotic Disease, deforestation, movement of viruses from wildlife to pigs, and from pigs to people.” He also cites “Contagion’s” portrayal of deficiencies in the production and distribution of vaccines and the challenges associated with isolating and characterizing a virus as elements that it gets right, even arguing that that a film containing as much information as this one could potentially have a second life in classrooms and at public health institutions after its theatrical release has ended.
     Despite conveying a few misgivings about the officials in charge and some of the bureaucratic problems associated with broad-scale response