How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The outbreak narrative begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and...