By Bloomberg News
Aug. 2 (Bloomberg) -- A Chinese town and its surrounding areas were quarantined after a man died of pneumonic plague and 11 others were infected, the local health authority said.
A 32-year-old herdsman died in Ziketan in Qinghai province, the provincial health department said in a statement dated yesterday. The other 11 infected people are mostly relatives of the deceased and are in “stable condition” in a designated hospital, according to the statement.
The quarantined area is adequately supplied with the necessities and people’s lives are “normal,” the department said. Ziketan, in the eastern part of Qinghai, has a population of about 10,000, most of whom are Tibetans, according to the information provider Baidu.com.
The local health department warned that anyone who has visited Ziketan and the surrounding areas since July 16 and has developed a fever or a cough should seek treatment at a hospital.
Pneumonic plague is spread through the air and can be passed from person to person through coughing and other contaminated articles, according to the World Health Organization. It is caused by the same bacteria that occurs in bubonic plague -- the Black Death that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe during the Middle Ages, the group said.
If diagnosed early, bubonic plague can be treated with antibiotics. Pneumonic plague, on the other hand, is one of the most deadly infectious diseases and patients can die 24 hours after infection, according to the WHO.
A married couple in western Tibet died in September last year after contracting pneumonic plague, China’s Ministry of Health said in October.
To contact the Bloomberg News staff on this story: Ying Wang in Beijing at ywang30@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 2, 2009 03:40 EDT
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