Three Hollywood diseases that aren’t complete fiction
Key Takeaways
Whether it's an intense outbreak-inspired apocalypse thriller or a tragic sudden illness in a romantic drama, Hollywood knows how to capitalize on the public's medical anxieties. While adventure and action movies lead the pack, contemporary zombie movies such as World War Z gross into the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to IMDB.
We don't expect any zombies to start popping up in doctors' waiting rooms, but these fictional TV shows and movies feature medical dilemmas with surprising roots in reality. Keep reading to see which Hollywood illnesses were inspired by real-life cases and medical science.
WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD
Game of Thrones
Greyscale vs epidermodysplasia verruciformis
HBO Cable Network
Many strange things transpire on Game of Thrones, but one of the most memorable is the mysterious illness known as greyscale, in which the skin becomes stone-like and eventually covers the entire body. Princess Shireen Baratheon and Jorah Mormont are the only known living survivors of the disease in George R.R. Martin's Seven Kingdoms.
Greyscale's route of transmission is comparable to ringworm or scabies, but its appearance and symptoms are remarkably similar to epidermodysplasia verruciformis (EV).
Also known as "tree man syndrome," EV came to the Internet's attention when media outlets reported on a Bangladeshi man's debilitating experience with the rare genetic condition. Patients typically have mutations in two genes—EVER1/TMC6 and EVER2/TMC8—which cause increased susceptibility to HPV infections, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In the case of Abul Bajandar, these factors lead to callus, scaly growths and warts similar in texture and appearance to wood or stone. The severity of the condition left Bajandar unable to work or even hold his daughter. However, after more than one dozen surgeries his medical team at Dhaka Medical College Hospital was able to remove more than 11 lbs of the growths from his body.
Contagion
Influenza plus Nipah
Warner Bros
One could say Steven Soderbergh's box-office success Contagion was viral in itself, grossing more than $135,000,000 worldwide. Centered on a fatal airborne illness that kills its hosts in a few short days and spreads around the globe just as quickly, the film's unfortunate characters present cold-like symptoms that rapidly progress into seizures, encephalitis, and a host of other neurological symptoms before meeting their end.
The creators borrowed (selectively) from medicine and epidemiology to concoct the most terrifying outbreak threat possible. The virus in the film is a combination of the influenza and Nipah viruses. Nipah is an emerging disease in South Asia that causes swelling of the brain and respiratory illness.
Luckily, influenza and Nipah's marriage is impossible in the real world due to incompatible genomes, but many of the film's scenarios are modeled after real pandemics. For example, H1N1 and SARS both spread around the world in a matter of weeks, and the film's use of bats and pigs as transmitters of the pathogen to humans is comparable to how Nipah is spread in certain regions.
Contagion even uses an epidemiological method called contact tracing to discover the source of the outbreak, so kudos to the creators for doing their research.
Zombieland
Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD)
Columbia Pictures Corporation
Everyone knows the classic zombie movie set-up: A horrible, highly infectious illness either turns living people into brain-dead, murderous cannibals, or causes the dead to rise from their graves and turn living people into zombies via a contaminated bite.
These scenarios are impossible, but those who remember the mad cow disease hysteria of 2003 will likely remember that there is in fact an illness the symptoms of which present in a similar manner to a Hollywood zombie. The creators of the 2009 Sci-Fi adventure Zombieland were not quick to forget the panic, using contaminated beef as the source of the film's zombie outbreak.
Mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE) was first reported in cows in the United Kingdom in 1986, according to the Center for Food Safety. Scientists insisted that the illness was not transmissable to humans until years later, when a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) was linked to human ingestion of infected animal products.
This form of the degenerative brain disorder is and was always rare, according to the NIH, but its symptoms were enough to send the public into a frenzy. Reports of rapid deterioration of intellectual abilities, vision, and coordination combined with severe anger, depression, insomnia, and confusion had some people believing a zombie apocalypse was nigh.
However, thanks to measures taken by the US Department of Agriculture and the US Food and Drug Administration, only four cows have tested positive for BSE since the 2003 scare.