History Main / ThePlague

* ''Literature/TimeRiders'': The genetically engineered Kosong-ni Virus.

* ''Literature/{{Victoria}}'': The New Orleans Flu wipes out a substantial portion of the US population, leading to panic migrations and harsh border controls, and contributes to the general breakdown of society. Later, the titular [[FallenStatesOfAmerica American successor state]] engages in a bioweapon exchange with a MiddleEasternCoalition, leading to millions of casualties.

* ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'':
** The disease that killed all the adults in "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E8Miri Miri]]".
** Rigelian Fever in "[[Recap/StarTrekS3E19RequiemForMethuselah Requiem for Methuselah]]".
** The disease from "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E4TheNakedTime The Naked Time]]" (and its sequel "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E2TheNakedNow The Naked Now]]") is apparently non-fatal, but is highly contagious and, in both episodes, adversely affects the crew in the midst of a disaster which could destroy the ship.
** The macrovirus in the ''[[Series/StarTrekVoyager Voyager]]'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E11Macrocosm Macrocosm]]". Especially nightmarish because of the monsters that exist solely as vectors, and are produced by the comatose sufferers.
*** Also in "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS1E4Phage Phage]]" an entire alien species struck with a plague, and is forced to steal body-parts from other species. Their weapons teleport organs right out of you. Fortunately, the only major character it happens to could be kept alive until his ''lungs'' are retrieved. If you're a RedShirt you may not be so lucky -- Torres and a nameless crew member are captured, and their captor comes back ''wearing the RedShirt's face'' to replace his own diseased skin.
** In [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS04E24TheQuickening one episode]] of ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', the Dominion infected an entire planet which resisted them with a plague that they call the Blight. Everyone is born with it, and it lives dormant in their bodies until "quickening", the phase in which the disease becomes active, which can occur at any time, and once a victim has "quickened", death is inevitable and there's nothing that doctors can do except [[MercyKill give them a quick death]]. This has caused the complete collapse of their society, turning what was once a space-faring civilization into something resembling the DungAges (it doesn't help that [[spoiler:the disease escalates much faster around any kind of electro-magnetic power source]]), and their population has dwindled as many do not live long enough to have children of their own. By the time Dax and Bashir find them, the people have resigned themselves to the idea that this will be a part of their society forever. When Dr. Bashir discovers a vaccine that will prevent future generations from being infected by inoculating them in the womb, even though ''he'' feels that he has failed because he can't save the generation that is currently infected, it's nothing short of a miracle to them.
*** The Federation's [[WellIntentionedExtremist "Section 31"]] also created a plague to kill the Changelings and win the war. Dr. Bashir was also involved in countering this plague in the series' last season.

* In the backstory of a UsefulNotes/Nintendo64 game, ''VideoGame/BattleTanx'', a plague killed 99.99% of women (later revealed to be all women who didn't have the power of "The Edge"). [[ExcusePlot Which is the reason]] the remaining men are tear-assing around in tanks.

* UsefulNotes/{{COVID|19pandemic}}[[UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic -19]], a disease pandemic caused by the coronavirus [=SARS-CoV-2=], was first identified in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, China, and spread globally in the first half of 2020. This in turn led to significant increases in mortality around the world and rolling lockdowns globally. Late 2020 saw the advent of vaccines to inoculate the population against the disease, but in turn the virus has started mutating to be more contagious and at least one variant can get around vaccines, so the fight continues. It's not helped by paranoid conspiracy theorists refusing to get the vaccine.

* The ''VideoGame/TraumaCenter'' series has a man made one in the GUILT and Stigma diseases [[spoiler:(Though the latter is due to technology gone wrong)]] Trauma Team kind of follows in the tradition by having [[spoiler: the Rosalia virus, which is comparable to the Ebola virus, only deadlier and with a dose of AxCrazy. The last arc focuses on a widespread outbreak of the disease.]]

** It's also worth noting that Ebola tends to kill via inducing cytokine storms in infected patients[[note]]This isn't unique to ebolaviruses; several other viruses, including certain strains of the flu, SARS, and COVID-19, can cause hypercytokinemia as well.[[/note]]. Essentially, ebolaviruses are capable of replicating very efficiently in many different cells, and this viral replication leads to the secretion of ''extremely'' high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines (cytokines being chemical signalling molecules that white blood cells use to communicate with one another.) These pro-inflammatory cytokines then activate more cytokines and other factors, which increase the production of ''more'' cytokines, and this rapidly leads to a constantly-escalting positive feedback loop of contradictory signals that results in the immune system going completely haywire. Ebola can also infect and kill endothelial cells, causing blood vessel injury that leads to bleeding; activate certain components of the coagulation cascade, leading to totally dysfunctional patterns of bleeding ''and'' clotting[[note]](the term for this is "disseminated intravascular coagulation"—basically, clots form in all the wrong places, causing organ damage ''and'' using up your body's supply of clotting factors, leading to more bleeding since you're now out of all the molecules/platelets that are needed to make clots[[/note]]; and evade certain components of the immune system, interfering with the function of dendritic cells[[note]]a type of phagocyte that bridges innate and adaptive immunity; it normally consumes pathogens, breaks them down, and presents samples of them to adaptive immune cells in lymph nodes, activating those cells[[/note]] in particular.

* In Creator/RobertEHoward's ''Literature/ConanTheBarbarian'' novel ''The Hour of the Dragon'', a plague is used to eliminate a king and his immediate heirs, to allow his young brother Tarascus to ascend the throne. Since the plague stops with the king's death, Tarascus is acclaimed as the chosen of the gods.

* In Richard Matheson's ''Literature/IAmLegend'', a disease turns most of humanity into [[NinjaPirateRobotZombie zombie vampires]]. Three times adapted for the movies.

** Smallpox epidemics were common, and due to the fact that no one in the population was immune due to previously catching smallpox (or cowpox, a virus closely enough related that infections with it provided immunity from smallpox), resulting in the entire population falling ill at the same time. Contrary to its portrayal in popular culture, the Native Americans died no more often from smallpox than Europeans did (typically averaging a 30-40% fatality rate, about the same as Europeans), but the fact that the entire population got sick at the same time could put other stresses on them.
** The worst epidemics on record in the Americas, however, were [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1576_Cocoliztli_epidemic a series of epidemics in Mexico in the 1500s]]. An initial population of approximately 22 million was reduced by about 8 million by the 1520 smallpox epidemic (a fairly standard death rate from smallpox, which had a fatality rate of 30-40%), followed by 12-15 million deaths from the 1545 cocoliztli epidemic, then by another 2 million deaths from the 1576 epidemic. Between the three epidemics, the population was reduced by over 90%, which is the source of the oft-quoted claim that 90% of the population of *all* of the Americas died from epidemics. Interestingly, cocoliztli is thought to be a native, rat-borne disease which was some manner of hemorrhagic fever rather than an imported European disease.
** Importation of diseases to the Americas was not just one-way deal: the Europeans got syphilis as an exchange. Whilst there had been similar diseases earlier in Europe, the American strand was extremely virulent, and it killed a lot of people, and rendered even more sterile. The majority of old European Medieval noble families died out and several royal houses (Valois, Tudor, Trastamara, Rurik) became extinct. The syphilis meant also a drastic change on sexual behavior -- and, unfortunately, hygiene. Since ''Treponema pallidium'' thrived in public baths and saunas, they all but disappeared in Europe. The following centuries were the real [[TheDungAges Dung Ages]], not Middle Ages.

* War tends to foster quite a nice set of plague conditions: disruptions of infrastructure, especially anything that will reduce people's ability for nursing; overwork because all the men are away fighting; disruption of food supplies leading to a poorer diet; dead bodies lying around; people resistant to the bugs in one area travelling to a second area where they are not resistant, picking up the bugs and then travelling to a third area where no one is resistant. Oh, and people not being aware of it due to censorship of reports of it happening.
** Up to and including the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar US Civil War]], the vast majority of deaths in wartime (even among the military) were from disease and not from fighting. Even some of the "minor" wounds one would get on a battlefield (if you can call getting your bones smashed beyond recognition or repair "minor") could be fatal because surviving even a "routine" amputation was basically nothing but luck as disinfection of wounds was not really understood at the time.
** The [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar US Civil War]] deserves special mention because of the approximately 600,000 casualties sustained (still the largest loss of American life in battle), about 2/3rds, or 400,000 were victims of disease. Mostly due to the conditions of camps with poor sanitation and even poorer medical care. However an important factor was the concentration of a mostly rural population into (relatively) small areas, meaning all those farmboys who lived alone were exposed to every single disease from across the nation.
** Several wars were decided by which army was less malnourished, disease-ridden and overall miserable. The Haitian Revolution arguably only had the outcome it did because the French Army came down with a major case of yellow fever at the worst possible time -- granted Haiti had some skilled military leaders and much more to gain from winning, but still.
** While modern medicine has since the late 19th century greatly reduced the number of disease deaths during most wars, wars taking place in less developed parts of the world can still display the old pattern of far more people dying from disease than from fighting. For example, the [[UsefulNotes/TheCongoWars Second Congo War]], which took place in the UsefulNotes/DemocraticRepublicOfTheCongo from 1998-2003, is estimated to have caused the deaths of more than 5 million people mostly from disease and starvation.
** [[UsefulNotes/TheSpanishFlu The 1918 flu pandemic]] was especially virulent precisely because it was pretty much the first war in history where troops were being constantly and efficiently transported all around the world, spreading the disease. Also, it's surmised that the conditions of the war itself made it easier for the virus to spread: Soldiers with only mild symptoms would stay in the trenches at the front line, while those with severe symptoms were transported to field hospitals... thus transmitting the disease further (which is the opposite of what happens normally, ie. people with severe symptoms tend to stay home, slowing the spread of the disease.) Oh, and the Allied and Central Powers were [[HeadInTheSandManagement suppressing reports of it]] [[SkewedPriorities to prevent it from affecting morale]], exacerbating the spread because people didn't know it existed. This led to it being called Spanish flu [[NonindicativeName even though it didn't originate in Spain]] because Spain was neutral, meaning Spanish journalists were allowed to do their job. It has been suggested that it wasn't anything about the supposedly "Spanish" flu itself that caused it to be so deadly but rather superinfections caused by malnourishment, overcrowded hospitals, and shitty hygiene, all a result of the war since getting away from death would take priority over eating and washing and an absurd number of people would be injured or fall ill.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease Ebola]]. As a virus, it's innately difficult to treat and it's rare enough that there are no specific drugs for it. A vaccine that works on humans courtesy of MSD was in development since the mid-2000s, but it's approved for medical use since late 2019-early 2020. Oh, and it makes your [[BodyHorror innards dissolve into a bloody pulp that you then bleed out]]. Thankfully, it had been confined to Africa '''[[ParanoiaFuel ...had]]'''. [[note]]One confirmed person-to-person infection in the United States, and one in Spain, thankfully it never spread farther than that.[[/note]] An important point is that Ebola is ''so'' virulent that it kills its victims before they can get very far—it's not airborne (you need to come into contact with the bodily fluids of a visibly-infected person in order to catch it), making transmission easily prevented by proper hygiene, which tends to keep it in isolated villages (until the 2014 outbreak -- which is itself ''mostly'' confined to a few desperately poor West African countries with extraordinarily weak public health systems).
** It's also worth noting that Ebola tends to kill via inducing cytokine storms in infected patients[[note]]This isn't unique to ebolaviruses; several other viruses, including certain strains of the flu, SARS, and COVID-19, can cause hypercytokinemia as well.[[/note]]. Essentially, ebolaviruses are capable of replicating very efficiently in many different cells, and this viral replication leads to the secretion of ''extremely'' high levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines (cytokines being chemical signalling molecules that white blood cells use to communicate with one another.) These pro-inflammatory cytokines then activate more cytokines and other factors, which increase the production of ''more'' cytokines, and this rapidly leads to a constantly-escalting positive feedback loop of contradictory signals that results in the immune system going completely haywire. Ebola can also infect and kill endothelial cells, causing blood vessel injury that leads to bleeding; activate certain components of the coagulation cascade, leading to totally dysfunctional patterns of bleeding ''and'' clotting[[note]](the term for this is "disseminated intravascular coagulation"—basically, clots form in all the wrong places, causing organ damage ''and'' using up your body's supply of clotting factors, leading to more bleeding since you're now out out of all the molecules/platelets that are needed to make clots[[/note]]; and evade certain components of the immune system, interfering with the function of dendritic cells[[note]]a type of phagocyte that bridges innate and adaptive immunity; it normally consumes pathogens, breaks them down, and presents samples of them to adaptive immune cells in lymph nodes, activating those cells[[/note]] in particular.

* There's also Panama disease, a wilting disease caused by a fungus that almost completely wiped out the Gros Michel banana, at the time the most popular banana on the market (this, incidentally, is why banana flavoring tastes so different from actual bananas). Not helping matters is Panama disease is resistant to fungicides and it spread so easily because, due to bananas being reproduced asexually in order to be suitable for consumption, all Gros Michel bananas were genetically identical. The scariest part? This could very well happen again: there's a new strain of Panama disease affecting the ''current'' most popular banana on the market, the Cavendish.
* UsefulNotes/{{COVID|19pandemic}}[[UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic -19]], a disease pandemic caused by the coronavirus [=SARS-CoV-2=], was first identified in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province, China and spread globally in the first half of 2020. This in turn led to significant increases in mortality around the world and rolling lockdowns globally. Late 2020 saw the advent of vaccines to inoculate the population against the disease, but in turn the virus has started mutating to be more contagious and at least one variant can get around vaccines, so the fight continues. Its not helped by the fact that paranoid conspiracy theorists refuse to get the vaccine.

* Pigeon flu in the series ''Series/{{Sloborn}}'' started in Southern Asia, and is slowly making its way to the characters' German home island Sloborn. It arrives with a GhostShip from the Dominican Republic, and then starts killing off islanders.

* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease Ebola]]. As a virus, it's innately difficult to treat and it's rare enough that there are no specific drugs for it. A vaccine that works on humans courtesy of MSD was in development since the mid-2000s, but it's approved for medical use since late 2019-early 2020. Oh, and it makes your [[BodyHorror innards dissolve into a bloody pulp that you then bleed out]]. Thankfully, it had been confined to Africa '''[[ParanoiaFuel ...had]]'''. [[note]]One confirmed person-to-person infection in the United States, and one in Spain, thankfully it never spread farther than that.[[/note]] An important point is that Ebola is ''so'' virulent that it kills its victims before they can get very far -- it's not airborne (you need to come into contact with the bodily fluids of a visibly-infected person in order to catch it), making transmission easily prevented by proper hygiene, which tends to keep it in isolated villages (until the 2014 outbreak -- which is itself ''mostly'' confined to a few desperately poor West African countries with extraordinarily weak public health systems).
** However, in the case of Ebola, it's not the disease itself that kills the host, but the cytokine storm that does. A protein in Ebola allows the virus to avoid the dendritic cells (a type of macrophage: they eat the disease and use a sample of it to generate antibodies by presenting it to the immune system). It then latches onto an organ and causes necrosis. When the immune system detects this, it causes a massive immune system assault in an attempt to kill off the virus, thus causing the hemorrhaging because the immune system attacks the organs as well.

* Pigeon flu in the series ''Series/Sloborn'' started in Southern Asia, and is slowly making its way to the characters' German home island Sloborn. It arrives with a GhostShip from the Dominican Republic, and then starts killing off islanders.

* ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolidVThePhantomPain'' has the vocal chord parasites, a virulent biological weapon that matures when the larvae are exposed to the unique vibrations in vocal chords created by speaking a specific language, at which point it attacks the victim's lungs, killing them quickly, but not before causing them to revert to zombie-like dementia to spread the disease to other victims. [[spoiler:Skull Face intends to use one specific strain of the parasites, attuned to the English language, in his plot to TakeOverTheWorld by robbing humanity of their dominant language.]]

* The VITAS plague cut back the planet's population by about 1/4, then another 1/10, in the future timeline of the ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'' game setting. Ironically, the second outbreak actually ''helped'' society; it came not long after goblinization first broke out (turning people into orcs and trolls), and seeing orcs and trolls catch VITAS made it clear that they were humans, not some sort of body-stealing monsters.

* An episode of the ''Anime/Cyborg009'' 2001 series has the Cyborgs finding out that a villain wants to drop a biological bomb, containing a mortal virus that he re-discovered, over Cairo, so he can sell the cure to huge prices. So it's up to them to first find out ''what'' virus did he work with, then stop him.
* The {{horror}} manga series ''Manga/{{Emerging}}'' centers around an Ebola-like plague that is [[TitleDrop emerging]] in the middle of Tokyo.

* In ''VideoGame/MortalKombat1'', following a CosmicRetcon, Tarkatans are no longer a distinct race in Outworld, but victims of a virulent illness known as "Tarkat". Symptoms include mutating into creatures with mouths lined with razor-sharp teeth, red eyes with slitted pupils, blade-like protrusions from the arms, and diminishing sanity that eventually gives way to ravenous violence.