Flu Rage virus used as interstellar weapon?
Don't scream zombies at this question. That is not meant to be what it is about, regardless of how it sounds.
I have an interstellar war between humans and an alien race. The humans are winning, so the aliens design a virus based off of the original flu that used to go pandemic in early human history. This flu, however, causes the infected to go insane and attempt to beat others to death. The goal is to destabilize the populations and make military maneuvers difficult by making humans require their military as riot control. This happens in a few hundred years.
How plausible is this scenario? Is there a way to make your immune system react in such a way as to accidentally fry the part of your brain that controls serotonin without frying the rest of the brain?
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1 answer
I think all the virus would need to do to have that effect is to dramatically ramp up the levels of adrenaline and testosterone. I think it is perfectly possible that a custom-designed virus could cause that. Indeed, it could simply contain extra genes for those hormones, to be expressed by any infected cell (basically turning every infected cell into an uncontrolled mass producer of those hormones).
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