The threat of Ebola virus has haunted our nightmares since Richard Preston published his "terrifying true story" The Hot Zone in 1994. Ebola hides in the African rain forest, but a deadlier disease than Ebola has begun killing young people in Britain and France. Ebola is a terrorist: it sickens people quickly and spares at least one out of ten. The new disease is a stealth agent: it incubates silently for years and kills every last victim it infects. Ebola is a sickness of fever and bleeding, no worse than cholera, a quick if not a merciful death. The new disease is an atrocity of destruction -- a headache, a stumble, and then hallucination, palsy, seizure and coma drawn out horribly for months. Victims' brains go spongy; their minds dim; they lose the ability to walk, to talk, to see, to swallow; they die slowly, drowning in pneumonia, or they starve to death.

Ebola can survive outside the body for a few days at best. Sunlight kills it. Ultraviolet light kills it. The new disease agent refuses to die. Assault with pressurized, superheated steam in the autoclaves that hospitals use to sterilize instruments for surgery barely slows it. It remains deadly after hours of intense bombardment with hard radiation, months of soaking in formaldehyde, years of burial, decades of freezing. It survives even the fiery furnace of a seven-hundred-degree oven.

How Ebola spreads is still uncertain, but scientists know it's a virus. In time, a vaccine will protect us from its threat. The new disease turns up no virus in victims' brains. It creeps past the barriers of species and immunity. Evidence accumulates that it's a bad seed, a mistake of protein, a misshapen crystal that forces the brain to poison itself. If so, it's a new kind of disease agent that can never be eradicated.

How the new disease spreads is known: it spreads in the cannibalism of animals by animals, it spreads in the industrial cannibalism of animal remains fed to animals, it spreads by the eating of beef.

Nothing that you are about to read is fiction. No names have been changed. However harrowing, every word is true.