The Cobra Event
1998 novel by Richard Preston
The Cobra Event is a 1998 thriller novel by Richard Preston describing an attempted bioterrorism attack on the United States. The perpetrator of the attack has genetically engineered a virus, called "Cobra", that fuses the incurable and highly contagious common cold with one of the world's most virulent diseases, smallpox. The disease that results from the virus, brainpox, has symptoms that mimic those of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome and the common cold. The book is divided between descriptions of the virus and the government's attempt to stop the imminent threat posed by it.
Plot summary
The book is divided into six sections. The first section, called "Trial", starts with a teenaged girl named Kate Moran who dies violently one day in school. The next section, titled "1969", describes tests done in the 1960s by the U.S. government involving weaponized viruses. The third section, "Diagnosis", describes the autopsy of Kate Moran and introduces the key characters of Dr. Alice Austen, Mark Littleberry, and Will Hopkins. The last three sections—"Decision", "Reachdeep", and "The Operation"—describe these three characters' journeys to discover the source of the lethal Cobra virus.
The public source identifies “The Cobra Event” as 1998 novel by Richard Preston. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cobra, Event and novel.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7726554. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Cobra Event” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.