Chinese city sealed off after outbreak of bubonic plaque

Chinese health officials have sealed off a town in a sparsely populated area of north-central China to halt the spread of an aggressively deadly strain of plague. As of Sunday, two men have died from the outbreak, and another 10 - most of them relatives of the first dead man — are under quarantine.

Rik Myslewski writes that the disease is pneumonic plague, which the World Health Organization (WHO) refers to as “the most virulent and least common form of plague.” Pneumonic plague is a variant of the bubonic plaque — the Black Death — that killed an estimated 75 to 100 million people worldwide in the mid-1300s.

Bubonic plague is spread by flea bites, but pneumonic plague needs no third-party vector. It is spread simply by inhaling the Yersinia pestis bacteria after it has been made airborne by an infected person’s cough. Untreated, pneumonic plague can kill in a day, with a mortality rate that “approaches 100 per cent,” according to an article published by two American clinicians. Early and aggressive treatment with antibiotics can, however, reduce that death rate significantly.

None of the ten under strict quarantine have shown signs of the disease, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency, which reported the first death on Saturday. They are, however, being kept under watch due to their association with the dead.

The two deaths from the current outbreak have occurred in the town of Ziketan in Qinghai province. Ziketan is huge: 3,000 square kilometers, according to Xinhua — more than 1,150 square miles. Ziketan is in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, and it has a population which more than 60 percent ethnic Tibetan and just under 30 percent Han Chinese.

Xinhua reported that a press release from Health Bureau of Qinghai Province claimed that they had sent a “team of experts to the area [that] had the plague under control” and that “the area has sufficient supplies and the quarantine has not disrupted the basic needs of the locals.”