From: nstlva@tin.it   
      
   “To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months.   
   It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to   
   the United States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important   
   and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff   
   ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of   
   the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of   
   man-made microorganisms created at that research   
   center.   
      
   “Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other   
   living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive   
   outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it   
   can’t permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax   
   and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires,   
   the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the   
   temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do   
   you see the advantage of all this?”   
   Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said,   
      
   but Elliot knew what the scientist meant. “If I understand you, the   
   Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then   
   there wouldn’t be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive   
   decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory.”   
      
   “Exactly,” Dombey said. “And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important   
   advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an   
   infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the   
   virus. That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no   
   one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s   
   worse than the Ebola virus in Africa—infinitely worse. Wuhan-400’s   
   kill-rate is one hundred percent.   
      
   No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on God knows how   
   many political prisoners. They were never able to find an antibody or an   
   antibiotic that was effective against it. The virus migrates to the   
   brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats   
   away brain tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys   
   the part of the brain that controls all of the body’s automatic   
   functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs,   
   or any urge to breathe.   
      
   see more:   
   https://www.google.it/books/edition/The_Eyes_of_Darkness/EdKNU1D   
   dbcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)