PLAGUE, PNEUMONIC - CHINA (02): (QINGHAI)

Date: Mon 3 Aug 2009
Source: The New York Times [edited]
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/world/asia/04china.html>


Officials have sealed off an isolated town of 10 000 people in rural
west-central China after an outbreak of pneumonic plague killed 2
residents, the state-run Xinhua news service reported on Monday [3 Aug 2009].

An official who answered the emergency line at Renmin Hospital in
Ziketan, where the outbreak is centered, said that all roads into and
out of the area had been closed off, but that residents remained free
to move about within the town. The official, who refused to give his
name, said it was unclear when the blockade would be lifted. Repeated
calls to a plague emergency phone line produced only busy signals.

Ziketan is a remote, ethnically Tibetan town in eastern Qinghai
Province, one of the largest and least populated regions of China.
Officials said the 1st victim, a 32-year-old herdsman, died last
Thursday [30 Jul 2009], and the 2nd, a neighbor who also was a
herdsman, died on Sunday [2 Aug 209], more than a day after being
admitted to a hospital.

Local health officials told Xinhua that they had quarantined 10 other
people, mostly relatives of the dead men, but that none had developed
coughs or fever, signs of the deadly disease.

While bubonic plague is spread by bites from infected rodent fleas,
the deadlier pneumonic plague bacteria are spread through the air by
coughing, and it kills about 6 in 10 sufferers, sometimes within a
day, if it is not treated.

The World Health Organization said that the mortality rate could be
reduced to about 15 percent through treatment with common
antibiotics. A spokeswoman for the agency told Bloomberg News that
experts were monitoring the outbreak but were not especially concerned by it.

[Byline: Michael Wines]