Editing Post-Apocalyptic (section)

=== Disease ===

<span style='color:green;font-size:100%'>'''''...distant nurglish laughter...'''''</span>

A new infectious variety of something appears. It might have been a freak mutation or it might have been made in a lab (either as an experiment, a horribly ironic medical treatment or a bioweapon) that gets out or it might be some space-bug. Either way, it spreads rapidly among the human population and is terminal. Attempts to contain and combat it are ultimately ineffective. Even if it can be fought societal breakdown prevents effective response for most people. For every person who is immune, vaccinated, recovers, is successfully treated or quarantined away in sterilized bunkers, dozens if not hundreds die. By the time the dust settles, most of humanity is dead. 

While disease is a natural phenomenon, a plague capable of wiping out whole civilizations typically occurs in a sufficiently advanced society with extensive trade networks; the black plague came to Europe from the Silk Road into the ports of Italy before wiping out a third of the continent - whereas individual, isolated villages would be spared because the plague would wipe out neighboring towns before it could reach them. But what's even more devastating is when a disease spreads to a population that has never been exposed to it before, and therefore has virtually no immunities to it; most of the indigenous people of the Americas were wiped out by diseases like smallpox and measles long before settlers began arriving en masse.

The thing about Disease is that it can clear out humanity while leaving it's stuff largely intact. The survivors can wander cities turned into colossal ghost towns, not shattered but left to decay as nature gradually reclaims the landscape. Similarly anxieties about disease are rather high nowadays given the whole global pandemic.
==== Examples ====
* A lot of Zombie Fiction.
* I am Legend
* [["Planet of the Apes"]] reboot