Overview

WILDFIRE is about fear. Fear that was prevalent in the late 1980s-fear of the poorly understood AIDS epidemic that was spreading across the nation like barely controlled wildfire. The novel tells the story of Jeremy Becker, a medical student infected by HIV as the result of a needle stick accident in a New Orleans hospital in 1987. Widespread fear triggers political overreaction that creates a dystopian world in which segregation is reborn-segregation based upon mandatory HIV blood tests. This bizarre segregation law provides automated machines that require insertion of one's HIV card to enter many public buildings, including hospitals, clinics, and medical offices. In that strange world that never was, but might have been, Jeremy advances through a surgery residency at the New Orleans Charity Hospital. The new law does have one good element. It provides unprecedented funding for Nobel-quality AIDS research that fuels Jeremy's hope for a life without the ever-present specter of AIDS. But that hope is frustrated by men in positions of power who are driven by greed to sabotage the AIDS research for their own personal gain. Their scheme causes the deaths of hospital patients, even threatens the lives of Jeremy and his roommate until, finally, they recruit the FBI to help them expose the nefarious plot. The lead FBI agent is a woman, and that's a problem for Jeremy's fiancee. Years later, Jeremy, now an experienced surgeon, presents the keynote address at a World AIDS Conference. He tells of his life during a time of extreme political manipulation of health care. He recounts a dark time in the annals of medicine and challenges researchers to craft a renaissance of hope for the worldwide millions affected by the scourge of HIV-AIDS.

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9781500918033

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George Beddingfield is a physician. After several years of conducting hospital accreditation surveys for The Joint Commission, he has retired to devote himself fulltime to fiction writing. George lives in San Antonio, Texas.

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