- At first, Paltrow’s character suffers flu-like symptoms after returning to Minneapolis from a business trip in Hong Kong. But after she collapses on the family’s kitchen floor, convulsing and frothing at the mouth, “I knew it wasn’t influenza,” Aguilar-Carreno said.
- Scientists identify the deadly microbe as a paramyxovirus, which, as he knows, is a family of viruses that can cause severe human and animal diseases.
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Finally, a quarter of the way through the film, exhausted scientists display two pictures of the magnified virus, which Aguilar-Carreno recognized.
Believe it
W. Ian Lipkin, director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity, served as the “Contagion” consultant. “We used as our inspiration the Nipah virus, which in the late 1990s jumped from bats to pigs to humans,” he wrote in a recent op-ed column of the New York Times.
The dry-erase board spanning Aguilar-Carreno’s office wall is cluttered with black, red and green etchings of the Nipah virus and accompanying equations that show how it latches on to a single animal or human cell and then enters like a viral shark.
“A big difference between those outbreaks and what happens in the movie is that, in real life, public health workers have been able to contain the virus before it spreads greater distances and kills more people,” said Aguilar-Carreno. “As far away as southern Asia may seem, it’s crucial to understand that, with air travel, it’s possible for Nipah to spread from one continent to another before the first infected person’s symptoms appear.”
Big scares, hard science
Early on, he learned that fruit bats are the natural host for the virus but they don’t get sick.
Six foot wing span: As deforestation reduces fruit
bats’ habitats, they fly closer to civilization where the virus is spread. |
“Even though the outbreaks had occurred pretty much unnoticed by the world, I saw that it had the capacity to develop into an infectious disease that impacts much of the world,” he said.
And so he went to work. In 2005, his research led him to co-discover the protein receptor on healthy cells that allows the Nipah virus inside to do its damage. The findings were published in the science journal Nature.
“At that point, we knew the where but not the how,” he said.
Just this summer, he moved to WSU to oversee research of the how at the Allen School for Global Animal Health. Working with “pseudo viruses” – incomplete Nipah microbes unable to replicate and cause infection – Aguilar-Carreno and his staff are zeroing in on how the virus fuses its membrane with the healthy cell membrane in order to invade with its RNA.
“Once we know that, it may be possible to block Nipah’s entrance with a vaccine or designer drug,” he said.
Getting real
Hector Aguilar-Carreno, WSU Paul G. Allen School for Global Animal Health, 509-335-4410, haguilar@vetmed.wsu.edu
Linda Weiford, WSU News, 509-335-3581, linda.weiford@wsu.edu