Why do some soaps include a common theme? In Neighbours and Home and Away there is the story of students having affairs with a teacher. In Corrie and Emmerdale there is the story of babies being swapped at birth.
Quite often they "borrow" stories from real life news stories, eg the baby swap storyline mirrors something that happened in real life, two baby girls were swapped and the mistake was not realised until they were toddlers.
This story came out a few months ago, I suppose the storywriters get the ideas from real life but it takes a couple of months to write them into the scripts so they tend to coincide