We asked Sam Dawson, author of the forthcoming medical thriller, INDEX CASE, what inspired him to write a novel about a pandemic. Here's what he told us...
Back in 2000 I was on a study weekend with a number of people who had worked or volunteered in Civil Defence and the Royal Observer Corps, back when nuclear war was the threat that transfixed mankind. Several were now involved in disaster planning, and they were reminiscing about the old days. "You know what scares the life out of me now?" one asked. "Avian flu".
Several years later I was on a similar expedition, with similar people. Only now they were coming out of retirement as the British government realised too late that it had thrown away almost all of its priceless Cold War protected infrastructure - everything from the public warning network to the fleets of Green Goddess fire engines and countless bunkers. It was a post-9/11 world where it had been noticed that the perpetrators of those attacks had also explored driving tankers of chemicals to reservoirs and sought licences to fly crop-dusting planes. Suddenly, under the name 'Resilience', emergency planning exercises were being shoehorned into exposed council offices to run simulations on how, with no personnel beyond the over-stretched emergency services and a few civil servants, the threats of flooding, climate change, terrorism and dirty bombs could be handled. Too late and too little, money was being spent. Quietly, every fire service local area received a hazmat vehicle capable of dealing with the results of nuclear, biological and chemical incidents.
The emergency planners were talking again. They all agreed on one thing: that despite all that had happened in recent years, the threat that they saw as certain to materialise, sooner or later - the one that literally kept them awake at night - was bird flu.
That was when I began to write INDEX CASE.
https://www.sam-dawson.co.uk/books/