For the record,
When I mentioned Anthrax, I was referring to the regularly-occurring kind...that normally becomes evident in Livestock and then gets passed to people in contact with, or close proximity to said livestock. Nothing weaponized certainly. My overarching point was that a conventional disease growing into an epidemic inside the close quarters of the prison is VASTLY more likely than the hyper-specialized "Walker Pathogen" suddenly mutating to the extent of making a vector-delivery change. A little research will illustrate just how very, VERY different microbes that survive easily outside biological hosts, and even moreso those that survive without a liquid water medium are from those that can't survive outside host bodies for longer than a very few minutes.
Just to touch on some of the basics: Airborne and long-term persisting pathogens INVARIABLY have either a) A spore-form they are capable of adopting, or b) A relatively very thick membrane surrounding them. By comparison, HIV (for example) is actually extremely conventional when it comes to its extreme fragility outside the body/blood. Water-borne pathogens are sort of the middle-ground between airborne microbes and those utterly dependent on their hosts to survive more than the next few minutes.
Not saying the writers might not be foolish enough to go with some sort of "Walker Pathogen has mutated, and now SOME RANDOM PEOPLE are now suddenly prone to developing post-bite-like symptoms seemingly out of the blue." Just that, biologically speaking, the Prison is a squalid, filthy place that would take thousands of gallons of bleach, steam pressure-washers, or both to render it something that wouldn't be INSTANTLY condemned by the Health Board by modern, pre-Apocalyptic standards. The outdoor, inside-the-fence area of the Prison is far, FAR worse. It's no stretch at all to believe "Gee, a place that had hundreds of rotting bodies lying in the same cells we're now using as bedrooms, AND that had dozens/a few hundred putrid walking corpses stumbling about or laying around in turned out to be rife with the potential for an epidemic. Who would have thought it?"
No need to stretch the boundaries of disbelief-suspension further with some mutation of the pathogen that reanimates the dead. Hell, it's the South. Every year we get a few cases of things thought of as very exotic, like Dengue Fever...and that's in our hygienic no-apocalypse world. Hell, we see a few cases of THE PLAGUE in the US every year. Why do you think dog-kennel/breeding operations are so much stricter in the U.S Southwest/West Coast? Because of the Plague-carrying fleas thick in prairie dog communities.
My point, however far afield I've wandered, is that a) The Prison Population is NOT experiencing ideal nutrition, b) The Prison and its grounds are potentially thick with any # of Infectious Agents, that would naturally strike the young, old, pregnant and already immuno-compromised first. c) Constant stress, also known as distress, is a known depressant of the immune system. d) The Prison's water supply cannot, due to a variety of circumstances, be verified as sanitary. Even if they've scrupulously checked all the internal plumbing they can access, the water is coming from somewhere, ergo it's passing through the same unclean conditions in which the Prison Population lives.
A solid argument for conventional disease-based epidemic in the offing I believe.
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Originally Posted by babomb
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