I was just watching a movie, and I noticed a trope that I had seen in other media before. Travelers come into a village that is wholly abandoned because some kind of contagion had killed everyone several months prior to their arrival, but nobody from the village had ever ventured out into the world and told anyone else of the tragedy that was occurring back home.
Did anything like this ever actually happen, and did it happen often?
To be specific, I'm not talking about plague times where deadly contagions were fairly common/expected. I'm talking about just one village becoming infected and nobody surviving long enough to alert others to the plight of their people.
Not a historian but have a Degree in Biology:
From an epidemiological perspective this is somewhat plausible, but unlikely (unless your movie takes place in Central Africa). The most serious infectious diseases (which are likely your only real candidate for something that can quickly affect and kill a lot of people) are going to be Bubonic Plague or Ebola.
Bubonic plague in it's pneumonic form (i.e. when infection occurs via the respiratory system) will effectively kill everybody it infects but requires direct exposure to patients infected with the plague ^[1] and inhalation of disease carrying droplets.
More typical Bubonic Plague will have a high mortality rate (30-60%) but fortunately won't spread human-to-human. ^[2] Bubonic Plague victims can however spread the pneumonic version of the plague, but this typically coincides with severe coughing fits (often with blood).
So to infect an entire village, somebody would likely need to contract the bubonic plague via a vector, and then everybody else would need to inhale aerosolized droplets containing the Y. Pestis bacterium. I'm going to speculate and say the chances of having everybody in a village exposed as pretty low.
Ebola is a much more insidious killer as it's directly transmittable human-to-human and has a 30-90% mortality rate ^[3]. Although it was only identified in 1976 it's believed to be a very ancient virus ^[4] ^[5]. If I had to choose between these two, I would put my bet on Ebola being able to wipe out entire villages, it is however only found in Central Africa.
There are other infectious diseases with extremely high mortality rates, but few are readily transmittable, highly infectious, or kill quickly enough. You need all these characteristics. Ebola and the Bubonic Plague are the best choices, but Ebola is endemic only to Central Africa. Bubonic Plague is much more wide spread (Africa, Asia and Europe) but requires a lot of things to go wrong in order to kill off an entire village.
It would be interesting to find out more about quarantines or responses to disease outbreaks in history from somebody who knows more about the subject. Isolating the infected is basically the best way of stopping the spread of Ebola and Bubonic Plague once an outbreak begins.
Piggyback question; hope it's okay.
What if a village was wiped out or its inhabitants carried off by raiders, with no one escaping? Is it possible there'd be a lag in the news getting out? Like "hmmmm, the ragman from Lower Fogbottom usually appears on Tuesdays, and it is now Thursday, I wonder if something's off?" And then a few days later a traveler would come through. "Have ye any news of Lower Fogbottom, a village fifteen miles to the north and east?" "Alas!" cries the traveler, "it hath been razed to the ground, and as far as mine eyes hath seen, all have been slain or carried off!"
Or something like that.