Krytos virus

The Krytos virus is a fictional bioengineered virus in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. The virus was released upon the capital world Coruscant by the Imperial leader Ysanne Isard just after the world fell to the Rebels (around 7 ABY). The Krytos virus helped ignite the conflict known as the Bacta War.

Background

Scientific
The Krytos virus was a deadly and highly contagious virus that only afflicted non-human species. It could be spread numerous ways, such as through water supplies and air. The virus often killed its host in less than two weeks, and caused a painful death.

The virus was specifically designed to be destroyed easily with bacta, a healing chemical. While Isard was certainly interested in killing as many individuals as possible, her primary goal was to cause discontent in the New Republic by making the demand for bacta skyrocket, then limiting its distribution, so as to make the treatment scarce and therefore very expensive. To counter this easy treatment, the virus was given a fast rate of incubation that made it kill a host very quickly, and Isard had her biomedical engineers design it so that it could spread easily, especially in the close confines of Coruscant.

The short incubation period of the virus proved to be its downfall: often, the virus killed its host too fast to allow it to spread as desired. Subsequent generations of the virus also became weaker and less virulent over time. Furthermore, large quantity of the virus had been frozen in ice as part of the plan to introduce it into Coruscant's water supply; Rogue Squadron boiled off a large amount of this ice in their action to capture Coruscant. Rogue Squadron's operations on the planet also allowed the New Republic to capture the planet much earlier than the Imperials had intended, so the production of the virus by Imperial bioengineers had also been cut short.

A from Thyferra offered his services to help cure the disease. He found that a mixture of ryll and bacta could be mixed together to fight the virus. This mixture, which came to be known as rylca, was manufactured by the Alliance at . It allowed for the treatment of those infected without using massive quantities of bacta. Finally, the liberation of by Rogue Squadron helped restore the flow of bacta to the galaxy and, most notably, the New Republic.

Political
While it seemed to the Rebels that Coruscant had legitimately fallen, the capture of the world was all a part of Isard's plan. Shortly before its fall, her biomedical engineers, including (who at one time had secretly run the Alderaan Biotics facility on Borleias), designed a deadly virus that attacked only non-human races. Isard hoped that this design, coupled with the Empire's subsequent capture of the bacta-producing world , would make bacta so scarce that the virus could not be treated. Thus, discord would be sewn in the newly-formed New Republic: alien races would be unable to get proper treatment, while humans would be completely unaffected (and indeed immune) to the virus. The New Republic would face a tough choice: acquire bacta at greatly inflated prices, or do nothing. Acquiring bacta at inflated prices would rob the fledgling government of much of its budget; doing nothing would make the sickened alien population resent the New Republic. The Bacta War was one of the first true tests of the New Republic.

In the end, disaster was averted by Corran Horn and Rogue Squadron, who helped free Thyferra from the clutches of Ysanne Isard and restore a free flow of bacta to the galaxy. The virus was quickly wiped out through numerous medical techniques, most importantly the administration of bacta to diseased individuals. This quick treatment, of course, destroyed the resentment building between New Republic humans and aliens; unfortunately, by this time, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives had already been lost to the disease.

The Krytos virus marks one of the most notable and prolific uses of biological warfare in the Star Wars galaxy.

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