Is Ebola the real ‘World War Z?’ (Spoiler alert: It’s 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 and industrialized warfare. I interviewed doctors, soldiers, journalists and someone who “has never gotten a check from the CIA” in an attempt to illustrate the fragile global systems that shield our species from the abyss. As a result, I’ve 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 “I predicted this!”, this time, I’m happy to say, my fictional plague could not be more different from the truth."

*However, roughly one month ago, when the world reached its collective-conscious tipping point, the response deviated sharply from both World War Z’s plot and from responses to AIDS and SARS, which inspired the book. For starters, media coverage of the Ebola virus has been both loud and consistent. Try opening a newspaper, or your laptop, or flipping on either the television or radio without hearing something about Ebola. You can’t"

*Just to put Ebola in perspective, since the initial reported cases 10 months ago, more than 4,500 people have died of the disease. While those are genuine tragedies, so are the roughly 600,000 Africans who died of malaria last year and the 1,000,000-plus Africans who died of AIDS. As an American, and as a parent, I’m not nearly as worried about Ebola as I am about the polio-reminiscent threat of Enterovirus D68.

Yes, it will be a long hard fight and, yes, there will be more heartbreaking death and suffering, but if I was writing World War Z today and I had decided to base it on our planet’s response to Ebola, it would have been much shorter and with a much happier ending."

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/16/is-ebola-the-real-world-war-z-spoiler-alert-its-not/