radioactive sewage

It's my supposition that, somehow, radiation reached the raw sewage that was dumped off the Long Island coast, and that within the radioactive sewage, the common plague bacillus mutated into a fast-growing and very virulent super-plague.

In the second-season episode "The Host" of The X-Files, the episode's main antagonist, a mutant creature dubbed "Fluke-Man" is traced to a Russian freighter that was carrying radioactive sewage away from Chernobyl.

Scully concludes her investigation, thinking that the creature was brought to the U.S. by a Russian freighter that was hauling salvage from Chernobyl, and that the creature was created in a 'soup' of radioactive sewage.