ABSTRACT
Viral celebrity illustrates intrinsic qualities of twenty-first-century network culture. The unique combination of quantity and quality of network connections produces both Typhoid Mary and Patient Zero as "index cases". Wald, will use the term 'index case' to refer to individuals singled out to measure the scale, efficiency, and perceived dangers of promiscuous network circulation. Wald points out that Typhoid Mary and Patient Zero were also celebrities of their time for reasons that speak more accurately of normative cultural values than of epidemiological truth. Local medical investigators in Hong Kong, working under the supervision of the World Health Organization's envoy, European woman, Dr. Leonora Orantes, played by Marion Cotillard, voice their suspicions about anti-Chinese prejudices on the part of the Euro-American alliance heading up the investigation. Steven Soderbergh's film Contagion is primarily concerned with the rapid spread of an unknown deadly human virus, attempts to identify and vaccinate against it, and the social and political fallout which results from this epidemic.
