"Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon" - The Eyes Of Darkness - Dean Koontz - (1981).

“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.

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