Egypt Closes Border as Black Death Outbreak Suspected in Libya

June 17, 2009 9:59 a.m. EST

Egypt has decided to close its border with Libya following confirmed reports that 16-18 people have been infected with bubonic plague in the Libyan coastal city of Tubruq.

The Egyptian Ministry of Health has decided to place Sallum, the port city bordering Libya, under quarantine, and health checks are being conducted on everyone returning from Libya. Tubruq is located 93 miles from the border with Egypt.

Egyptian officials have sent two high-level delegations to the area to set up a field laboratory and an isolation facility outside Sallum. Hospitals in the region have been put on high alert and additional ambulances have been sent to the area as part of the preventive measures.

There has been no independent confirmation of the outbreak but the World Health Organization (WHO) has dispatched a team to the region to assist the Libyan government to investigate the reports, a spokesperson for WHO told The Media Line.

The first cases surfaced just over a week ago in the Boutronp region, 18 miles south of Tubruq, when several villagers fell ill and some died, according to the Pandemic Information News blog. Libyan Health Ministry personnel have been trying to contain the outbreak, the blog maintains. :-)

The outbreak could be connected to the consumption of camel meat or caused by camel fly bites, some bloggers believe. They cite a case in 1976 when five Libyans living in a remote village died after slaughtering a sick camel and eating its meat. Other cases where the consumption of sick camel meat or goat intestines resulted in plague outbreaks were reported in Jordan in 1997 and in Saudi Arabia in 2005.

The World Health Organization describes the plague as essentially a disease of wild rodents. The plague is spread from one rodent to another by flea ectoparasites and then to humans via the bite of infected fleas or during the handling of infected hosts.

However, one Egyptian blogger, Ahmed Hassan Bakr, claims that the outbreak is the result of bacteria leaking from the remains of the stocks of biological weapons in one of the Libyan military camps in the region.

The bubonic plague is also known as the 'Black Death', as black bumps sometimes appear on the victim's skin. While today the disease is treated with antibiotics if discovered quickly enough, in just four years, between 1347 and 1351, 75 million-a third of the European population at the time-perished from the disease.
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