BEIJING: A Chinese town sealed off after a man died of plague re-opened yesterday after authorities found no further cases of the illness, state media said.
Authorities barred 30,000 people living in Yumen in the northwestern province of Gansu from leaving, while road blocks prevented others from entering, after a 38-year-old died from plague last week.
“We have not discovered any new plague cases,” the state-run China News service cited Gansu’s health bureau as saying.
It added that authorities had exterminated rodents and fleas in designated quarantine zones, while 151 close contacts of the man had been kept in isolation for nine days without showing symptoms.
Reports said that earlier this month the victim had fed his dog with a dead marmot, a small furry animal similar to a squirrel, and developed a fever the same day.
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, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) says on its website.
AFP
