El cine como instrumento de comunicación sanitaria

Abstract

Seated on a comfortable armchair, amidst the halflight provided by the multi-shaded light shaft when shocking against a huge and white screen, and wrapped up by a clear and potent sound, one feels to have entered a new dimension. Unconsciously, he/she dives in a story where reality and fiction get melted. It is the miracle of cinema, the Never Ending Story. A piece of that race to death called life, even the above mentioned finishing line of some characters is the story’s plot. For the union with this other dimension to be whole, it is necessary that the made up narration is interesting and well retold. In the African jungle, an infectious disease outbreak is killing off every inhabitant in a village; instead of getting healthcare assistance they are being annihilated; to avoid the outbreak’s spread or to hide an unmentionable reason? A monkey witnesses the events. The camera approaches a medical research center of the USA Army, it penetrates inside the place, slides on its corridors, arrives at the labs, some written characters explain what the images are showing, level 1…, till the level 4, where the impressiveness of the biological security clothing makes every explanation unnecessary, which, despite of this, is provided on grounds of narrative coherence. All of this takes place along with the credits of Outbreak (1995), by Wolfgang Petersen, while the action, during the posing, runs towards the lives of its main characters, the doctors Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) and Keough (Rene Russo). The theater’s light was switched off only some minutes ago and the audience, though being unaware of the plot, has already got in contact with the outbreak of an infectious disease and, not even the best masterly lesson could have shown to its members, in a more explicit way, the existing biological security levels. Probably, only the healthcare professionals that work with biological agents are supposed to have consciously perceived the details; the audience members, as a whole, must have thought that they were progressively brought into more dangerous places, until reaching the most hazardous one in a pathogens research center. The film has well apprised many people of two healthcare facts. This example proves that the seventh art is an overpowerful mass media. The couple of healthcare professionals have just had supper; he gets closer to the DVD, presses the “on” button, then the “open” one, puts a DVD on the pad, he presses the button for the machine to get the disk and then the “play” button on the remote control. Again, on the screen, this time on a 40” TV, the above mentioned images make its appearance. When Daniels and Keough get together, she comments: Stop! Have you noticed? Review! Some days later, this sketch is reproduced in the classroom of a University and, this is likely to be the best approach the students will be made regarding the biological security levels. A professor of ethics ends his lesson saying primum non nocere, reminding Thomas Sydenham (1624- 1689). Some time before, he has told the students, while having a closer look to the film Outbreak, that it is not licit for a healthcare professional, whatever the circumstances, to take part in or allow the extermination of a population in order to control an epidemic. Turning back to the film, indeed the action begins with the encounter of the main characters, a couple of medical doctors, a man and a woman, and it reflects to perfection the current reality of this profession within developed countries, the equality among professionals without taking into account the gender condition. Afterwards, the audience will witness different features of the activity carried out by them and other healthcare professionals. Minutes go by and a new message is sent to the neurons of the audience: there are illnesses that come from other continents and that, being transmitted by animals, can violently outbreak within the first world populations. They are so important, that even a professional journal is exclusively devoted to them, Emerging Infectious Diseases, freely distributed and at everyone’s disposal on the net. From this moment on, the messages are multiple: which are the signs and symptoms of the disease, which is its etiological agent and how it appeared, how it is transmitted, how one can control its spread and how it can be cured. All this long process runs along with sub-plots and sketches that the audience understands to be true, no matter each one’s profession. No amendments when it comes to the presence of a filovirus, whose microphotograph will remind the professionals of that of the Ebola virus. Either it is repulsive to science that the inter-human transmission of the virus takes place through several ways, from the blood or the air, for instance. In both cases, the film shows the transmission effectively, through two simple resources: one of the sketches shows the break-up of a tube in a spinning machine that splashes to a character, and another one showing the exhale that an infected person generates while breathing, in the darkness of a cinema. The measures of severe isolation are shocking, but not the clinical profile or the mention of the fact that the virus could be the result of manipulation, and mutant or recombinant, given its relation with biological weapons of mass destruction. There is a moment when everybody thinks that what the films explains is not possible, at least up to day, when it shows the consecution of a treatment after recovering the virus that carries the monkey that, moreover, is reached within a few hours. The plot of Outbreak is quite an accurate and complete summary of what the reader will find in this article and, this and much more is what the cinema communicates, communications that allow a further analysis on the audience’s behalf and which can have as a surname that of “sanitary”. 1895, the year in which the Lumière brothers introduced their over-famous invention, established the beginning of a beautiful friendship, between communication and the seventh art, and later on, that of cinema and medicine, and that is how the cinema held the status of a powerful mass media and a healthcare education useful device.