I haven't had any luck on medical forums (totally open to suggestions on other places to check out!). For background, the community is in New England, about 2K people - small, but not necessarily isolated. Time period is late 1990s. I need some kind of illness to kill off about 25% of the town; I was thinking a respiratory virus. The town "old money" family has to be linked to it somehow - they own a large publishing company. I'm not sure if the illness should be directly related to something they do (like contaminated water, instead of a respiratory virus) or if the trusted patriarch should give bad advice that results in people dying when they could've been saved.
A big community barbeque where half the people there ate the barbequed chicken with a particularly virulent strain of salmonella in the sauce.
If it only hits the town, it has to be something localized, and a respiratory disease probably wouldn't be. Food or water poisoning is more likely to be localized. Or an asteroid hits their town.
Thanks! I decided to go with water supply poisoning due to a factory the old money fam is involved with.
You may need to get creative and take some artistic license unless you want it to be a natural disaster or violent attack. But as long as it seems rational I don't think readers will care. Only reason I say that is because I'd think New England in late 90s would be one of the most developed and probably educated regions in the world at the time, even compared to today. The closest thing I could think of is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack and the terrorists did, in fact get over 500 people sick, but only about 75 needed hospitalization and none died. And the town is a bit bigger than yours. But if you explain it as a particularly resistant strain of something, maybe it will sound realistic. If it's Winter, and everyone in town is indoors at some carnival or something, you could have something like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack But again, that's very obviously foul play.
2,000 is rather small, even by small New England town parameters (although there are many New England communities that are much smaller, those are extremely unlikely to have any "old money" families in them). I live in a small(-ish) New England town -- population a shade under 10,000. We had a situation several years ago where the gasoline tank at the town's public works garage sprung a leak, which went undetected for a period of many months (and may be been years). Small New England towns almost never have a public water supply (I have to specify "almost" because my grandparents were in a small town that then had a population of about 500 and which had a small reservoir and public water system). That means most homes have their own wells for water supply -- some being shallow "dug" wells, most being drilled wells with depths typically 100 feet to 500 feet. In the case of my town's gasoline leak, by the time it was discovered most of the wells within a radius of at least a half mile of the center of town were severely contaminated. If this "old money's" publishing company uses toxic inks, perhaps the vehicle for killing off the populace could be a leak into the aquifer underlying the town.
Exactly where I was about to go. Though I would suggest something more toxic, arsenic perhaps, since it does have industrial uses. Or the old money could have cheaped out on upgrading safety equipment for say a grain silo. The dust in them can be very explosive. Illegally dumped toxic waste with ground water contamination. Strike that we don't want a town of superheroes, darn you Marvel.
I was told a real story by someone whose family came from rural Poland. Her grandmother as a child was the only one of a community that survived a big community knock up dinner where someone accidentally served lethal mushrooms.
The community holds an musical festival and bands from nearby areas attended. One band has two members who are infected, and spreads because the show is held indoors. We find out, the virus mutated through a super spreader.
