Inevitably, there has been grumbling at the failure of US intelligence agencies to see how fast the Tunisian contagion would spread.
In support of the case that this was a fast-acting, direct contagion, archaeologist Dr Barney Sloane found that in the medieval City of London all wills had to be registered at the Court of Hustings.
That means disease and contagion can spread faster, experts say, because animals are concentrated in fewer places.
In Steven Soderbergh's similar (but inferior) film Contagion, people die fast and clean.
The consensus is that the Spanish downgrade shows that the financial contagion is spreading fast from Greece, and quite possibly heading our way.
Yet what's really scary in "Contagion" is how fast once-humming airports and offices, homes and cities empty out when push comes to shove comes to panic in the streets.
China is expected to remain the star, with 7% growth in both yearLast time Latin America was tipped to be the world's fastest growing region, but as contagion has spilled over from Asia and Russia, growth forecasts have been savagely cut.
Moody's one-notch downgrades, which included Commerzbank, the country's second largest bank, were signals that the contagion from ailing euro economies like Greece and Spain might be spreading faster and farther than even pessimists in the markets had assumed.
While Ebola outbreaks are brutal for those who catch the disease, the nature of its contagion means that it's unlikely to actually spread that fast or far.
They ignored warnings of likely contagion in early 2010, at a time when they should have moved fast to negotiate a debt restructuring, which wasn't achieved until 2012.
