An infectious disease specialist from  St. Michael’s Hospital offers a subtle plot twist on the movie Contagion, which is about a lethal virus that spreads quickly around the globe and kills within days.
 
Say the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who unknowingly carries the deadly microbe, has a stopover at Pearson International on her way home from a China business trip. While here, she coughs and sneezes, spraying fellow travellers with airborne droplets containing the bug.

Toronto suddenly becomes a hot spot for the international spread of a lethal pandemic.

It’s not such a far-fetched scenario, says Dr. Kamran Khan, explaining it is not unlike how SARS took hold in Toronto in 2003.

“Cities like Toronto would inevitably be infected. We are one of the worlds most highly interconnected cities,” he says.

Khan is one of two Canadian researchers at the forefront of preparing for future global infectious disease outbreaks, like the one depicted in Contagion. He and Montreal-born Dr. John Brownstein, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, are coupling their scientific research with new technology to track and predict the spread of infectious diseases.

Khan studies the flight paths of billions of international travellers to anticipate how infectious diseases will spread on his website biodiaspora.ca. He and a team of researchers created a map, based on the action thriller, showing how an outbreak in Hong Kong would spread worldwide.