"Miri" (season one, episode eight; production code: 12; 27 October 1966): Wikipedia-link.
Commentary: The Enterprise encounters the first of several duplicate Earths. A landing party beams down to investigate an automated distress signal & become infected with the disease that all but wiped out the native population. Our heroes race against time to devise a cure, unable to return to the Enterprise for fear of infecting the crew, & also confront the native survivors, long-lived children who are centuries old but still act childishly.
An underappreciated peril of Star Trek's style of space travel, involving numerous humanoid species who are able to interbreed (seemingly because of a common origin, courtesy of "The Chase" [Star Trek: The Next Generation, season six, episode twenty (1993)]), is infectious disease. Captain Kirk, Mister Spock, Doctor McCoy, Yeoman Rand, & two red shirts beam down & become infected immediately. No scan detected the disease before they beamed down, & using the transporter to screen out the infection was apparently not possible. This would seemingly happen all the time, & not every starship would have a chief medical officer as capable as Bones.
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