ce with an old boyfriend before returning to her husband and family in suburban Minneapolis. At first she appears to have contracted a cold during her trip. Her son, Clark, also becomes symptomatic and is sent home from school. Beth's condition worsens and two days later she collapses with severe seizures in her home. Beth's husband, Mitch (Damon), rushes her to the hospital, but she continues to seize and dies of an unknown virus. Because it affects the brain and central nervous system, pathologists attribute it to a meningoencephalitis virus. Mitch returns home and finds that Clark has also died from a similar infection. Mitch is put in isolation but turns out to be genetically immune to the disease. He and his daughter attempt to flee the city, but a military quarantine has been imposed, and they are forced to return to their home to face decaying social order and rampant looting of stores and homes. Not knowing whether his daughter inherited his immunity, Mitch struggles to balance his teenage daughter's frustration with quarantine with his desire to protect her, while trying to come to terms with his own loss. In Atlanta, representatives from the Department of Homeland Security meet with Dr. Ellis Cheever (Fishburne) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and express fears that the disease is a bioweapon intended to cause terror over the Thanksgiving weekend. Cheever sends Dr. Erin Mears (Winslet), an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis to begin the investigation. In addition to tracing the outbreak back to Beth, Dr. Mears has to negotiate with local bureaucrats reluctant to commit resources. She later becomes infected with the disease after being in contact with contaminated fomites while staying at her hotel. The Minnesota National Guard arrives to quarantine the city, and a badly deteriorating Dr. Mears is moved to the field medical station she helped set up, where she later dies. Investigations into cures via treatment protocols or vaccines initially prove fruitless as scientists cannot find a culture to grow the new virus, which has been named the Meningoencephalitis Virus One (MEV-1). Professor Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) violates orders from a CDC scientist, Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle), to destroy his samples and identifies a line of bat cells that will support research of a vaccine. At the CDC, Dr. Hextall uses this breakthrough to begin to characterize the properties of the virus, which turns out to have a mix of genetic material from bat, pig and human viruses and appears to spread via fomites with a basic reproduction number of two. This later goes up to four after the virus mutates. A conspiratorially minded freelance internet blogger, Alan Krumwiede (Law), posts videos about the disease, and in one of them appears sick and later claims that he recovered using a homeopathic cure called forsythia. Panicked people attempting to obtain forsythia overwhelm pharmacies, accelerating the contagion as infected and healthy people congregate. Krumwiede leaps to national attention and, during a television interview, accuses Dr. Cheever of informing friends and family to leave Chicago before a quarantine is imposed. It is later revealed Krumwiede was never sick with the virus, but was attempting to boost demand on behalf of investors in the companies producing and distributing the homeopathic treatment. He is arrested for conspiracy and fraud, but is soon released after his 12 million blog readers collect and pay his bail. Dr. Hextall identifies a potential vaccine, using an attenuated (live) virus. Because of the difficulties of human subjects testing, she follows the precedent of other vaccine researchers and inoculates herself first. Hextall visits her gravely ill father in the hospital to expose herself to the virus and test the vaccine. Production of the vaccine is rapidly ramped up and the CDC awards vaccinations via a random lottery based on birth dates for one full year until every survivor is vaccinated. Dr. Cheever, feeling guilty for his past actions to protect those who are close to him, gives his fast-tracked MEV-1 vaccination to the son of a janitor he works with at the disease center. Dr. Hextall places the surviving samples of the MEV-1 virus in cryogenic storage with H1N1 and SARS. Dr. Leonora Orantes (Cotillard), a World Health Organization epidemiologist, travels to Hong Kong to trace the origins of the infections. She collaborates with Sun Feng (Chin Han) and other local Chinese epidemiologists and public health officials and they identify Emhoff as patient zero. As the virus spreads, Feng kidnaps Orantes to use her as leverage to obtain the first MEV-1 vaccines for his village. Orantes spends months living in rural China with the villagers until the vaccine is announced. Feng exchanges Orantes for the vaccines, which turn out to be placebos. Orantes rushes away when she is informed of this, presumably to warn the village. The film concludes by tracing the origin of the virus from a bat nesting in a tree being cleared by Emhoff's mining corporation. The bat flies to a nearby pig sty and drops a banana where it is eaten by the pig, presumably transferring the bat virus into the pig. The pig is sold to and butchered by a chef in a Macau casino, who greets Beth Emhoff without washing his hands of the pig's blood, transferring the bat-pig hybrid to her and creating the MEV-1 human strain. Meningoencephalitis Virus One Meningoencephalitis Virus One (MEV-1) is the fictional highly contagious and lethal meningoencephalitic virus that appears in the film. Its origin and symptoms are based on the Nipah virus. The virus itself is a paramyxovirus that infects both the lungs and the brain, causing a hacking cough and fever and a severe headache, followed by a seizure, brain hemorrhage and ultimately death. With a fast incubation period, MEV-1 kills a person within 3?4 days of contracting the virus, with symptoms emerging only hours after infection. The virus itself is transmitted via respiratory droplets and fomites, surfaces that infected individuals have come into contact with. In the film, the virus is portrayed as being one of the most dangerous infectious agents, combining a fast and hard-to-control form of transmission and a mortality rate in excess of 20%. The film itself does not tell the audience an exact number for the amount of deaths attributed to the virus, but towards the end of the film, a newscaster announces the death toll to be near 26 million globally.

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