I totally agree about the dumbness of the germ thing in this day and age, but it's one of those elements - I think - that if you leave out or change till it's unrecognizable, you're simply not telling "War of the Worlds."
I would have liked there to have been some gobbledeegook rationalization how a technologically advanced civilization could have overlooked some area of infectious danger ... but I suppose such convoluted exposition would have slowed the ending to a crawl.
Perhaps Tim Burton did it best by having mortality result from hearing the Indian Love Call. There's no way the Martians could have anticipated
that!
