Yikes - Pneumonic Plague in China
Fortunately a small town and the Chinese have locked it down.
From
PhysOrg:
China seals off NW town as plague kills 2nd man
China locked down a remote farming town after two people died and 10 more were sickened with pneumonic plague, a lung infection that can kill a human in 24 hours if left untreated.
Police set up checkpoints around Ziketan in northwestern Qinghai province, where townspeople reached by The Associated Press by phone Monday said the streets were largely deserted and most shops shut.
Authorities urged anyone who had visited the town of 10,000 people since mid-July and has developed a cough or fever to seek hospital treatment.
On Sunday, a 37-year-old man identified only as Danzin became the second reported fatality from the outbreak. He lived next door to the first, a 32-year-old herder. The 10 sickened, mostly relatives of the herder, were undergoing isolated treatment in hospital, the local health bureau said.
The World Health Organization office in China said it was in close contact with Chinese health authorities and that measures taken so far to treat and quarantine sickened people were appropriate. It did not comment on the move to seal off the town.
"This form of pneumonic plague is probably the least common but the most severe," said WHO's spokeswoman in China, Vivian Tan. "It has a very high fatality rate and generally spreads quite easily. So we're certainly concerned about the situation."
Swine Flu just rates a Meh? from me -- of the 700 people killed by it worldwide, all cases were people whose health was otherwise compromised. It is worth remembering that the U.S.A. averages about
200,000 hospitalizations due to plain old garden variety Influenza and
36,000 deaths.
Now
Pneumonic Plague is scary -- 98% of the cases happen in Africa. For it to show up in a rural area of China makes me wonder if there is an underlying Bubonic infestation. Same bacteria, different infection sites...
Posted by DaveH at August 4, 2009 8:42 PM