A true touch of insanity?

While it is generally accepted that a cosmic event or alien
intervention can lead to mass insanity or turn normal people into
bloodthirsty monsters, what about an engineered virus with two
significant traits -- it is transmitted by touch and it causes
extremely violent behaviour.

The first might be simple, and I'm surprised that more virii occurring
in nature don't use it -- the sweat glands in the palms (merocrine?)
seem ideal for transfer as the pressure of a handshake could easily
force a virus down the short duct. 

I don't think the second part requires an overly large stretch of the
imagination -- tumors in certain parts of the brain are known to cause
psychotic episodes, so a virus destroying a large number of cells in a
certain area/of a certain type might easily cause irrational violence.

Result: a simple handshake leads to psychopathy.


Is such a thing at all possible? 



SFnal aspects: 

1) In a normal pandemic, some percentage of the population will be
immune. In this case, one infected person might injure or kill 2, 6,
or more people, meaning that immunity to the virus does not
automatically equate to living through the pandemic.

2) If the latency is relatively short, it might be used to polarize
society (i.e. if a sweaty-palmed politician on the campaign trail is
infected first, they'll pass the virus on to hundreds of supporters
every day, and when the first effects are seen, they'll be among the
people of xxx political party and those who associate closely with
them).



(What my backbrain fed upon: I'm reasonably sure it was later proven
false, but in the 50s, a researcher suggested that schizophrenia might
have viral origins, basing it at least partially on the fact that it
tended to run in families, and children adopted into an "infected"
family were more likely to have it than natural children who were
adopted at birth into a "non-infected" family.)
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