Mark Twain once said truth is stranger than fiction. We certainly live in times when the unthinkable often becomes reality. But ever once and awhile life and fiction crossover, and it's difficult to tell which came first. It happened 13 years ago when two planes flew into the Twin Towers. Until then, no one had ever thought of using passenger jets as flying bombs. Actually, that's not correct. More than a year before the 9/11 attacks, Joel Rosenberg penned The Last Jihad. In his story terrorists seize a jet with the intent of using it as weapon of mass destruction against the U.S. government. Sound familiar?
The same eerie parallel occurred today when news broke that the nurse in Dallas infected with Ebola received a transfusion from Dr. Kent Brantly, an Ebola survivor. This is ripped right from the pages of The Christ Virus––page 325 to be exact. I had a crazy thought when I wrote this scene more than four years ago: what if in a desperate attempt to save an infected person, a virus survivor donated his blood? In this case, the virus was much deadlier than Ebola. The current Ebola strain has a mortality rate of 60%, but the Zaire strain is fatal 90% of the time.
The theory behind the transfusion treatment is the blood of an Ebola survivor should contain antibodies. By giving an infected patient the blood plasma from a survivor, those antibodies should help fight off Ebola. It's too soon to tell if such an unconventional treatment will work, but it does in my story. You can order The Christ Virus at amazon.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment