
Jennifer Ehle in Contagion/Warner Brothers
For his part, Lipkin strongly advocates fixing certain holes in the system pointed out in the film. As co-chair of the CDC’s National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommitte, he and his colleagues called for a list of remedies in a report earlier this year, addressing jurisdictional inefficiencies, lack of data sharing and research, plus the absence of federal oversight. He also argues that although acute bacterial or viral infections get the lion’s share of the public’s attention, we should also be greatly concerned with the role of infections in chronic diseases, autoimmune disorders, and in mental illnesses. Neonatal infections in particular, he says, can have devastating effects in the longer term but don’t reveal themselves initially.