Chinese Town Sealed Off After Plague Deaths
BEIJING — Officials have sealed off an isolated town of 10,000 people in rural west-central China after an outbreak of pneumonic plague killed three residents, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Monday.
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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, but that residents remained free to move about within the town.
The official, who declined 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.
The World Health Organization in Geneva is “concerned and monitoring the situation closely,” a spokeswoman said.
Ziketan is an ethnically Tibetan town in the east of Qinghai Province, one of China’s largest and least populated regions. Officials said the first victim, a 32-year-old herdsman, died Thursday, and the second, a 37-year-old neighbor who also was a herdsman, died Sunday. The third was a 64-year-old man, Xinhua reported.
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.
Pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs, is closely related to bubonic plague, which killed scores of millions worldwide in the 1300s. While bubonic plague is commonly spread by flea bites, the deadlier pneumonic plague bacteria is spread through the air by coughing, and it kills about 6 in 10 sufferers if it is not treated, according to the W.H.O.
The W.H.O. spokeswoman, Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, said that China regularly reported small, outbreaks of bubonic plague but that having it evolve into pneumonic plague was “unexpected.”
The organization said that the mortality rate could be reduced to about 15 percent through treatment with common antibiotics.
Most cases of plague occur in Africa, but the United States records about 10 to 15 cases a year, mostly in rural areas.
