Hanta. Also sometimes called "Four Corners" disease.
if this is the plague I'll be upset. However, after lastnight the retaliation will be very swift.
No, a few cases of real "plague" happen naturally each year too, as well as the hanta virus. Like rabies, it stays at a low simmer in the animal population, and sometimes hops to humans who have the misfortune of encountering the infected wildlife.
But as others have pointed out, what used to be a decimating killer centuries ago has been tamed by simple antibiotic treatment today. An actual bubonic plague epidemic is high unlikely today thanks to modern medical treatment.
Also interesting is that even before modern science, the black plague was losing deadliness in each of its waves, thanks to the action of, drumroll please, evolution.
And not because people were developing immunity, either -- the plague became weaker over the centuries even when it hit areas (and populations) where it had never been before.
Instead, the plague disease was evolving to be more benign, because the more deadly variants would often kill off a human host before it even had a chance to spread. Thus the more deadly variants often weeded themselves out over time, while the less deadly variants lived longer (as its human host lived longer), had more time to spread, and was more "successful" in reproducing itself than the more deadly variants.
This is classic evolution in action, and over the centuries the plague became more of a symbiote (able to live in hosts long times without killing them) and less of a fast, certain killer.
This is a common trend for many deadly diseases -- if they kill their hosts too quickly, they're less "successful" as a species than if they drift towards a more "can't we all get along" existence.
Comparing it to current events, a bacteria which rapidly kills its host is like a suicide bomber, which usually takes itself out of the gene pool the same time it takes out its host -- and likewise has no future itself.
Note that it's also been theorized that the *Black Death* epidemic that eliminated a third of Europe's population may have actually been a double-whammy of both a bubonic plague outbreak combined with an anthrax epidemic. But of course anthrax could never be spread here....
-archy-/-