It’s a good joke!
But it’s also a real problem with medical curricula/testing when questions are written such that stereotyping takes the place of thinking. Because the vast majority of patients with cough and fever who recently traveled to the Southwest will NOT have plague, hanta or cocci.
When I was in medical school some of us noticed that in every case study with a gay man the correct answer was going to be AIDS, and when a case featured a Black patient with chest pain, the correct answer was going to be cocaine-induced arterial spasm. And so on…
So we groused about it among ourselves. Until one of our classmates (a women’s studies major out of a public college) thought hey I actually have the tools to tackle a problem like this. And she teamed up with another bright student, and the 2 of them sold the idea to a PhD faculty mentor, and scraped up funding, and organized a team of fellow students to comb through the thousands of pages of notes of every test and lecture given us during the entire 2 years of classroom education. And analyzed the stats, and wrote the paper, and submitted it, and got it published. And decades later it’s still getting cited.