{"id":235,"date":"2014-10-19T13:40:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T13:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=235"},"modified":"2014-10-19T13:40:13","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T13:40:13","slug":"is-ebola-the-real-world-war-z-spoiler-alert-its-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"Is Ebola the real \u2018World War Z?\u2019 (Spoiler alert: It\u2019s not)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/great-debate\/2014\/10\/16\/is-ebola-the-real-world-war-z-spoiler-alert-its-not\/\">Is Ebola the real \u2018World War Z?\u2019 (Spoiler alert: It\u2019s not)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/great-debate\/files\/2014\/10\/RTR2Q9LN.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone  wp-image-35112\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.reuters.com\/great-debate\/files\/2014\/10\/RTR2Q9LN-1024x690.jpg\" alt=\"RTR2Q9LN.jpg\" width=\"614\" height=\"414\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2006, I released a novel about a global zombie plague that drives humanity to the brink of extinction. While the zombies may have been fake, I tried to anchor the human response (political-military-economic-cultural) in reality. I studied the history of pandemics, natural disasters and industrialized warfare. I interviewed doctors, soldiers, journalists and someone who \u201chas never gotten a check from the CIA\u201d in an attempt to illustrate the fragile global systems that shield our species from the abyss. As a result, I\u2019ve been repeatedly asked if the current outbreak of Ebola is the real-life incarnation of my novel. As much as any author would love to crow about how \u201cI predicted this!\u201d, this time, I\u2019m happy to say, my fictional plague could not be more different from the truth.<\/p>\n<p>It could be argued that there are some similarities between the initial Ebola outbreak in West Africa and my fictional virus. Early on, there were missed warnings, such as a U.S. intelligence group\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.foreignpolicy.com\/articles\/2014\/09\/26\/why_big_data_missed_the_early_warning_signs_of_ebola\">failure to mine data<\/a>\u00a0that was written in French. There was also an obvious lack of interest on the part of the industrialized world. Not only were the headlines already taken up by Islamic State and the war in Ukraine but, let\u2019s be honest, ignoring the plight of Africans is shamefully commonplace in the First World.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is Ebola the real \u2018World War Z?\u2019 (Spoiler alert: It\u2019s not). In 2006, I released a novel about a global zombie plague that drives humanity to the brink of extinction. While the zombies may have been fake, I tried to anchor the human response (political-military-economic-cultural) in reality. I studied the history of pandemics, natural disasters [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[223,232,311,607,855,893],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-ebola","tag-ebola-virus","tag-fiction","tag-pandemic","tag-viral-pandemic","tag-world-war-z"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}