I'm betting something like Anthrax personally,
Anthrax can go from healthy-seeming to exuding bodily fluids at all orifices in something like 24-30hrs, and thats in our world of great hygiene, FDA-inspected food, antibiotics and antiseptics so readily available we use them on paper cuts etc. These people are GROWING FOOD on ground they've splashed WALKER BRAINS ON. Beyond that, they're piling terminated Walkers hip-deep at the fencelines, and any NUMBER of really nasty diseases can go quasi-airborne if the volume of decaying corpses is sufficiently dense. By quasi-airborne I mean there's enough dead Walkers at the fenceline that dust-like bits of them could be getting blown into a random airway of someone alive now and then...ESPECIALLY one of the kids who were loitering within spitting distance of numerous Walkers.
Or what about all the dead flesh that's being cheese-grated off the Walkers as a) They press and claw at the fence under their own power, and b) Are PRESSED AGAINST the fence by Walkers coming up from behind. When we were talking 2 Walkers here, 3 Walkers there, no big deal. The way Carol was talking "We had another major buildup overnight, they're grouping around Towers 3 and 4 again. It hasn't been THIS BAD since *last month*....." having dozens upon dozens of Walkers pushing and clawing at those fences day in, day out seems to be their new norm. Just how would scraped-off and continuing-to-decay tissue from the Walkers' hands and faces would it take for the volume of contaminated tissue to hit "critical mass" and become a contagion-threat as the wind shifts to blow through the fence and into the prison?
Or, like someone else said, theres absolute no telling what level of sanitation the water supply is in. That prison was at one point LOADED with Walkers and plain old dead bodies. One chunk of rotting flesh pressed up against a leaky water line somewhere and you could have any number of truly vile infectious agents in the water.
Given how uncoordinated Patrick-the-Harry-Potter was as he entered the shower area, how sweaty and how desperate he was to spray himself with water, I think we can all agree that WHATEVER the source of his illness, that kid was running a MASSIVE fever. Like cook-the-brain 106-degree fever. Petechial(sp?) (broken blood-vessels in the eyes) bleeding can also be a symptom of intense fever. Maybe some of us are looking at this backward:
Instead of the bloody-eyed Walker being the SOURCE of the disease that brought down Patrick, maybe he was also a VICTIM of said disease, who died of it and reanimated as Patrick did? Those blood-vessels didn't spurt blood into the whites of his eyes post-mortem after all.
I seriously HOPE they aren't going in some cheesy "The Walker Contagion is now airborne" direction. That would make any survival outside a NORAD-type bunker a very limited/unbelievable proposition, and make it too easy to bring down characters. A regular, good-old-fashioned lack of 21st-century hygienic amenities-caused epidemic is FAR more likely than an EXTREMELY SPECIALIZED contagion like the "Walker Microbe" suddenly a) Jumping the species barrier to bring down a pig, even if pigs and humans ARE susceptible to many of the same diseases, but more importantly b) Mutating so dramatically as to become completely airborne...especially now that living human hosts to serve as incubatory-intermediaries are so incredibly rare. If it was going to go airborne it would've happened when there were still 5.8 billion or so people left...NOT 50 million or so scattered across who knows how many continents and now separated by innumerable geographic barriers.
Anthrax, Cholera...even a bad Staff Infection...all more likely. Whatever the cause though, there's a Walker in a cellblock full of sleeping people. That's a recipe for quite a few fatalities right there.
Edit/Note: Also, given Patrick's rapid reanimation...he is likely STILL contagious with whatever-it-was that killed him, assuming it wasn't the "Walker Microbe"...so even if say, he lunges at someone, they grapple and his intended victim flings Walker-Patrick off him and then terminates him/it with a blow/shot to the head...they've just been breathing air pushed in their face by potentially infection-filled lungs due to Walker-moaning, have their hands covered in contagious body-sweat from fevered Patrick, though his impromptu shower might have mitigated some of that...or the blood he's dripping as he totters towards his first victim...all potential mediums for conventional microbes to be passed to another person.
Now THERE'S a scary thought. Cholera or Anthrax-contaminated Walkers. Forget being bitten, hope you brought a respirator to that melee struggle.
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Originally Posted by MinionZombie
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