Seen Contagion yet?
It's pretty scary. A new epidemic disease comes out of nowhere and starts killing everyone. It infects the brain - victims suffer seizures, or fall into a coma, and die. It spreads like wildfire. Humanity's only hope lies in Lawrence Fishburne and Kate Winslet.
Luckily, that's fiction. But only just.
In the movie, the killer bug is called "MEV-1", but it might as well have been called the Nipah virus, because it was closely based on a real disease of the same name. So much so that this post about Nipah contains movie spoilers.
The Nipah Virus came to the world's attention in late 1998. There was an outbreak of a severe fever accompanied in many cases by encephalitis (viral infection of the brain) in Malaysia and Singapore. 276 patients were recorded. 40% of them died.
In the initial outbreak, there was probably no person-to-person transmission of ...
