Like most of my novels, The Canopy is a blend of fact and fiction.
The Angry People and Keyba Village are fictional, but their language, religious beliefs, and spiritual practices are based on the beliefs and practices of the Yanomamo tribe in Brazil as described in Mark Ritchie’s Spirit of the Rainforest. As I read Ritchie’s book, the nonfiction account of the Yanomamo shaman’s experience, I was stunned to learn about the tribe’s encounters with nabas (outsiders), angelic visitors in white, and the spirit they now call Yai Pada.
The information about prion diseases is almost accurate, the exceptions being: (1) the timeline of Alex’s progression of symptoms and (2) the fact that fatal familial insomnia is presently considered to be genetically inherited. No evidence yet suggest that it is passed from mother to child as Alexandra theorizes. Prion infections, however, have been transmitted from mother to offspring in animals, so I think Alexandra’s hypothesis is reasonably valid.
I need to make one other correction—though my research led me to believe bleach reliably killed the infective agent behind scrapie, in May 2003, only weeks away from this novel’s printing, I discovered a more recent source which states that since prions are not living organisms like bacteria or viruses, antibiotics and other drugs have no effect upon them. “You could put pure bleach or pure formaldehyde in a test tube with them and it wouldn’t destroy them,” says Arthur Caplain, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania (The New York Times Magazine, May 11, 2003, p. 39).
At the time of this writing, there is no cure for prion diseases, though in January 2003 The New York Times reported that researchers have found a way to treat two deadly heart ailments caused by misfolded proteins. Scientists are hoping that this treatment, consisting of a “small molecule” drug that halts the misfolding process, will eventually be used to treat other prion diseases.
We have not heard much about transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in the United States, but in September 2002, I stumbled across an article in People magazine about three hunters who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, most likely contracted from eating venison. CJD, as it is commonly called, is a prion disease. A December 16, 2002, Newsweek contained an article about herds of deer infected with chronic wasting disease (another prion disease) in the American midwest. While I do not believe there is a reason to panic, I do believe these diseases are among us and should be closely monitored.
I, for one, am not going vegan . . . yet.