Medical staff raced to disinfect a sealed-off town in northwestern China today after a third person died within four days in a pneumonic plague outbreak in the farming community of 10,000, local authorities said.
Police set up checkpoints around Ziketan in Qinghai province after the outbreak was first detected last Thursday. The lung infection is highly contagious can kill a human in 24 hours if left untreated.
Medical staff are disinfecting the area and killing rats, insects and fleas that can be carriers for the bacteria, a notice on the provincial health department Web site said. Authorities are keeping close track of people who came into contact with those infected.
Authorities urged anyone who had visited the town since mid-July and has developed a cough or fever to seek hospital treatment. Pneumonic plague is spread through the air and can be passed from person to person through coughing.
The latest victim was a 64-year-old man named Danzhi, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
He was a neighbor of a 32-year-old herdsman in Ziketan and a 37-year-old man who died earlier. A further nine people - mainly relatives of the herdsman - are infected and in a hospital, according to the local health bureau.
Of those, one is in an extremely serious condition and one other has developed symptoms of coughing and chest pain, but the rest are in stable condition and there have been no reports of new infections, Xinhua and the health department said.
Police checkpoints were set up in a 17-mile radius around Ziketan and people were not allowed to leave, a resident said. Many shops remained closed today, residents said, although more vehicles were out on the street.
According to the World Health Organization, pneumonic plague is one of the deadliest infectious diseases, capable of killing humans within 24 hours of infection.
A 2006 WHO report from an international meeting on plague cited a Chinese government disease expert as saying that most cases of the plague in China's northwest occur when hunters are contaminated while skinning infected animals.
Pneumonic plague is caused by the same bacteria that causes bubonic plague - the Black Death that killed an estimated 25 million people in Europe in the Middle Ages. However, bubonic plague is usually transmitted by flea bites and can be easily treated with antibiotics.