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Meningo-encephalitis virus 1 (MEV-1) is the highly contagious and lethal meningo-encephalitic virus that appeared in the 2011 disaster film Contagion.

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An infected person with early symptoms of the MEV-1 virus.

It is a paramyxovirus that infects both the lungs and the brain, causing hacking coughs and fever, a severe headache, followed by severe diffuse encephalitis(swelling of the brain), seizures, and ultimately, death. With an unusual incubation period, MEV-1 kills an infected person in approximately four days after infection and within hours of the onset of symptoms. The virus is not airborne, but transmitted by fomites, meaning it is transferred primarily through objects and surfaces - an infected person with germs on their hands touches a surface, and then another person touches that surface, contaminates their hands with the virus, and ulimately becomes infected by touching their own mouth and nose. A chimeric virus, MEV-1 is a combination of two viruses whose natural hosts are the domestic pig and a species of fruit bat native to China.

MEV-1 originated in Hong Kong when a bulldozer from Beth Emhoff's company is clearing a forest knocked down a palm tree where bats were nesting. The bats became disturbed and flew away. One of the bats was carrying a deadly disease and it flew onto a banana tree. The bat ate a chunk of the banana and find a shelter over a pig pen. The bat accidentally dropped a chunk of the banana out of its mouth and into the pig pen, where a piglet ate the banana, and became infected with the bat's disease, creating a hybrid virus whose bat-and-pig-infecting gene sequences combined to make a new sequence deadly to humans.

The next day, a group of Chinese chefs collected the piglet and sold it to a casino. The casino chef prepares the pig's carcass by placing spice into its mouth, making his hand a fomite for the virus. The chef merely wiped his hands in his apron instead of washing them, then went shook hands with Emhoff, ultimately infecting her with the disease.

MEV-1 is said to have killed 26 million people worldwide, and infected several hundred million more survivors, by the time a vaccine is developed, 131 days after the first case. Had the casino chef washed his hands before touching Beth Emhoff, his own face, or anyone else, it is possible that the first and only sample of MEV-1 would've been denatured and washed away without any human ever knowing it existed.

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