From Deseret News archives:
U.S. health officials prescribing doses of medical accuracy for TV shows
The plot line was the suggestion that HIV doesn't cause AIDS — a fringe theory promoted on the Internet and by certain African leaders. But the two physicians weren't there to doctor the script.
They just wanted to make sure the TV show followed some standard doctor advice: First, do no harm.
Surveys show that most people believe the medical information they see on television dramas and soap operas. With fictional TV shows playing such a powerful role in public health education, the government is dedicated to keeping an eye on what Hollywood says. That's why the CDC is one of four government health agencies that fund the "Hollywood, Health & Society" program at the University of Southern California. The program has an annual budget of nearly $564,000.
It's run by a former CDC employee, Vicki Beck, but the real "talent" are government health officials and other medical experts the program sets up with writers of daytime soap operas, nighttime dramas and other shows.
To be sure, many TV shows consult with doctors, lawyers and others professionals on plot details. Some even hire physicians to be writers. The executive producer of "Law & Order: SVU" is an MD.
Still, some TV and movie scripts skirt — or outright ignore — the practical limitations of the real world. Some low points:
• "Medical Investigation," an NBC series in 2004-05, made health officials cringe. The show didn't even get the names right: The series' heroes did the out-in-the-field epidemic detective work of the CDC, but were identified as employees of the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that's more focused on lab science. Worse, the heroes wore leather jackets instead of protective gear when checking for a deadly pathogen.
• "Fatal Contact," an ABC movie last spring about bird flu reaching the United States, was denounced as unrealistic by some prominent flu experts for, among other things, showing an Angolan village strewn with bloody bodies that looked more like a mass suicide than an area hit by flu.
• "Outbreak," a 1995 motion picture starring Dustin Hoffman, involves a government plan to bomb a California town to stop the spread of an Ebola-like contagion. But CDC officials insist that they would not deal with such an outbreak by bombing towns.
Beck's program tries to head off such errors.
