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"...if you want to know what your future looks like, don't waste your time on Analog; read Time magazine. We are already saturated in the future. "
- Peter Watts

Engineered Plague  
  A virus that primarily attacks one sex.  

The plagues. Were there any women anywhere who weren't infected? Hovey thought not; they had all caught it, every woman; he didn't want to think of it. He sighed and rubbed one hand over his eyes. But that had been the enemy's masterstroke, surely, as good as anything Hovey's own people had ever delivered. To scatter an infection that fastened only on the female half of humanity, an infection that drove them, young or old. modest or wanton, irresistibly toward the male, urged by the inward fire of the disease. . . . Nothing else could so have poisoned human life, could so have maimed the human race.

In women the plague smouldered quietly. It betrayed itself only in their pitted skins, their roughened voices, their cracked lips. But the men who received the virus from them, transmuted by its incubation in their bodies, died quite quickly and, Hovey thought, quite unpleasantly. There was a gangrenous rotting and a smell. No doubt of it, that plague had been the enemy's masterpiece.

Technovelgy from The Hole in the Moon, by Margaret St. Clair.
Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1952
Additional resources -

Compare to designed bacteria from Seeds of the Dusk (1937) by Raymond Z. Gallun and the specific gene weapon from The Mannichon Solution (1967) by Irwin Shaw.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Hole in the Moon
  More Ideas and Technology by Margaret St. Clair
  Tech news articles related to The Hole in the Moon
  Tech news articles related to works by Margaret St. Clair

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