Plague-hit town gets green light to reopen
Print Edition
THE town of Yumen, which was sealed off after a local resident died of the plague, reopened yesterday after officials found no further cases of the illness.
Authorities barred 30,000 people living in the town, in northwest China’s Gansu Province, from leaving, while road blocks prevented others from entering, after a 38-year-old man died from plague last week.
“We have not discovered any new plague cases,” the Gansu health bureau said.
Authorities have exterminated rodents and fleas in quarantine zones, while 151 close contacts of the man were kept in isolation for nine days without showing any symptoms, it said.
The man had been in contact with a dead marmot, a type of ground squirrel, Xinhua news agency reported earlier.
Bubonic plague is a bacterial infection best known for the “Black Death,” a virulent epidemic of the disease that killed tens of millions of people in 14th century Europe.
A more recent pandemic, the Modern Plague, began in China in the 1860s and reached Hong Kong by 1894, according to the website of the United States Centers for Disease Control.
If diagnosed early, bubonic plague can be treated with antibiotics, according to the World Health Organization, but in its pneumonic form it is “one of the most deadly infectious diseases.”
In 2012, a resident of the village of Litang, Sichuan Province, died of plague after eating a dead marmot.
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