FAQ

It would stand to reason that for the President of The United States to sign off on such a move is not be taken lightly. Remember the man presiding over the meeting said "if the President goes down we all go down with him". The thought of ending up in prison doesn't sit well with him so he needed the military officials assurance that dropping the bomb was the only remaining course of action to eliminating Motaba.

BLU-82 "Daisy Cutter"

Colonel Sam Daniels, MD (Dustin Hoffman) of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland works tirelessly to identify the source of and develop a cure for the Motaba virus, a deadly virus discovered 39 years ago at an encampment in Zaire (Africa) and thought to be eradicated when corrupt General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) ordered the entire encampment to be bombed after securing a sample of the virus to use as a biological weapon. Aided by his ex-wife Roberta "Robby" Keough (Rene Russo) of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia; Daniels and Robby must work together to stop the spread of the Motaba virus when it suddenly shows up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Cedar Creek, a small rural town in California.

Outbreak is an original screenplay by American screenwriting partners, Laurence Dworet, MD and Robert Roy Pool. Although the story is fictional, it was inspired by an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Africa in 1976 and similar outbreaks in Virginia, Texas, the Philippines, and Italy.

That scene, which takes place 30 years prior to the setting of the movie, is supposed to show that Major General McClintock and Brigadier General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman) knew from the getgo that the Motaba virus had the potential of being made into a biological weapon, since they were the ones who recovered it when it first appeared. They ordered that the encampment be bombed as they flew away in their helicopter. Under McClintock's plan, it was their goal to obtain a sample of the virus and then wipe it out completely so that no one but the U.S. Army had control of it.

The source of the U.S. outbreak was a female monkey, captured in Africa and illegally transported into the US. When Rudy Alverez (Daniel Chodos), the pet shop owner, refused possession of the monkey because he wanted a male, the monkey was set free near Cedar Creek, California. Unfortunately, the monkey passed the virus to both Rudy and to Jimbo Scott (Patrick Dempsey), the monkey's deliverer. Jimbo then flew to Boston where he kissed his girlfriend, and they both died hours later without infecting anyone else. Back in Cedar Creek, the virus was passed to a lab technician when a vial of Rudy's blood exploded in a centrifuge, and the lab technician spread it during a coughing fit at a movie theater. At this point, the virus was transmitted by direct contact, e.g., Rudy was scratched by the monkey, the lab tech was sprayed with the blood, the droplets of the technician's spittle landed on people around him. The virus subsequently mutated, becoming airborne, and was, thus, passed to other patients in the Cedar Creek Hospital via the airducts.

Although Daniels, the USAMRIID virologist who investigated another recent outbreak of the Motaba virus in Zaire, is experienced with the virus and would be an ideal person to send to Cedar Creek, McClintock and Ford do not want him to find out that they knew about the Motaba virus from 30 years ago. Consequently, they claim that the CDC is handling the outbreak as a civilian problem, and they order Sam to investigate the outbreak of another virus in New Mexico. However, Sam changes his flight destination and flies to California instead, where he discovers that his ex-wife Robby is heading up the CDC investigation.

Because E-1101 was developed from the strain of Motaba virus as it existed 30 years ago and was ineffective against the newly-mutated strain.