A real-life case of human plague comes just weeks ahead of the upcoming “Fear The Walking Dead” series premiere.
No, actually. The headlines a little misleading. But the story, or the germ of the story, if you’ll excuse the bad pun, is still pretty frightening. A kid has been diagnosed with the plague. The article doesn’t specify what kind of plague it is; one would assume it’s of the bubonic variety, since no other information is given. Maybe it’s like with Madonna. No one needs to mention her last name, because everybody knows who she is. Or Prince. One name says it all. So “the Plague,” capital P, is probably of the bubonic variety, the infamous “Black Death” transmitted by rats and fleas that decimated one-third of the population of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Yes, THAT Plague. In the 21st century. In Los Angeles, one of the largest and most technologically advanced cities in the world. No, we’re probably not looking at an outbreak, but just knowing that the Black Death is still around is a little unsettling. And let us not forget that we share the planet with Ebola and God only knows what other even-more-nasty, waiting-to-be-discovered virus or bacterium. While we aren’t likely to see any rotting corpses shambling around anytime soon, some pathogen-driven nightmare like WORLD WAR Z or 28 DAYS LATER is disturbingly possible, and not just in the minds of Hollywood script writers.