Some history on plagues. I think I watched a special on NatGeo about this, in increased periods of drought followed by heavy rain, we tend to see hemorrhagic fevers and plagues begin to climb. The increase in the RAT population and the increase in fleas have a lot to do with that.
Here's a neat article that talks about some of the history:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb...tart:int=1&-C=
Megadeath in Mexico
02.21.2006
Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could still be out there.
by Bruce Stutz
Courtesy The Mexican Institute of Social Security
The Virgin of Guadalupe, shown in a 19th-century Spanish engraving, allegedly appeared during a 1531 smallpox outbreak and became the patron saint of New Spain.
When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of "megadeath." The toll forever altered the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes as well as their swords.
The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they came to the New World was well established by the 16th century. Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the people of the West Indies and had begun to spread to the South American mainland.
In 1565 a Spanish royal judge who had investigated his country's colony in Mexico wrote:
It is certain that from the day that D. Hernando Cortés, the Marquis del Valle, entered this land, in the seven years, more or less, that he conquered and governed it, the natives suffered many deaths, and many terrible dealings, robberies and oppressions were inflicted on them, taking advantage of their persons and their lands, without order, weight nor measure; . . . the people diminished in great number, as much due to excessive taxes and mistreatment, as to illness and smallpox, such that now a very great and notable fraction of the people are gone. . . .