What about Prions?
They do not have the ability to infect on their own but imagine they somehow get into the global food supply. I think they are slow enough acting that no one may notice for a long time. When it becomes apparent there is an issue it is too late. Pretty sure there is no cure, at all, and it is invariably fatal with things like BSE (mad cow disease).
There are bacteria that can do that. Chlamydia and gonorrhea can cause infertility, especially in women.
So Paris Hilton will never have kids?? :eek:
The Tasmanian Devil disease is actually a rarity: a communicable form of cancer. The only other one I’ve heard of is a form of leukemia in dogs.
Bacteria might be more persistant outside a host but they’re more susceptible to antibiotics.
It’s unlikely that a 90+% die off superbug could evolve naturally, because it couldn’t sustain itself. Of course all bets are off with an artificially modified disease.
I wonder if a killer virus could work by infecting bacteria in the gut and programming them to start making botulinum toxin. The immune system might not be able to even recognize the source of the problem before the person died.
The wikipedia page (which I assume is the source) says that the estimated death toll WORLDWIDE was about equivalent to 1/3 of the EUROPEAN population at that time. That’s very different from saying it killed one out of three Europeans. And I suspect that ‘equivalent to 1/3 of the European population’ is using the very highest of the estimated death counts.
Not to trivialize it, but while lots of people died, it wasn’t 1/3 of society.