City sealed off after bubonic plague death

China has sealed off parts of its north-western city of Yumen after a resident died of bubonic plague last week, state media said.

A 38-year-old was infected by a marmot — a wild rodent — and died on July 16. Several districts of the city of about 100,000 people in Gansu province were subsequently turned into special quarantine zones, Xinhua said.

It said 151 people who came into direct contact with the victim were also placed in quarantine.

None have so far shown any signs of infection, the news agency said.

The 30,000 people living in Yumen are not being allowed to leave, and police at roadblocks on its perimeter are telling motorists to find alternative routes, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said.

“The city has enough rice, flour and oil to supply all its residents for up to a month,” CCTV added.

The city had set aside 1 million yuan (€119,000) for emergency vaccinations, the Jiuquan Daily, a local newspaper, said.

The plague is a bacterial disease spread by the fleas of wild rodents such as marmots. While the disease can be effectively treated, patients can die 24 hours after the initial infection, the World Health Organisation says.

Outbreaks in China have been rare in recent years, and most have happened in remote rural areas of the west. China’s state broadcaster said there were 12 diagnosed cases and three deaths in the province of Qinghai in 2009, and one in Sichuan in 2012.

Beijing’s disease control centre sought to dispel worries about a wider outbreak of the disease in China, saying on its website that the risk of the disease spreading to the capital was minimal.

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.

“Over the next 20 years, it spread to port cities around the world by rats on steamships,” it says.

“The pandemic caused approximately 10 million deaths.”