A city in northern China sounded an alert Sunday after a suspected case of bubonic plague was reported, according to official media here.
Bayannur, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, announced a Tier III pest prevention and control warning, state agency People’s Daily Online reported.
The suspected bubonic plague case was reported Saturday by a hospital in Bayannur. The local health authority announced that the warning period will continue until the end of 2020.
“Currently, there is a risk of a human plague epidemic spreading in this city. The public must improve their awareness and self-protection capacity, and report abnormal health conditions immediately,” said the local health authority.
On July 1, the state news agency Xinhua said two suspected cases of bubonic plague reported in Khovd province in western Mongolia have been confirmed by the results of laboratory tests.
The confirmed cases are a 27-year-old resident and his 17-year-old brother, who are being treated at two separate hospitals in his province, a health official said.
The brothers ate groundhog meat, the health official said, warning people not to eat groundhog meat.
According to Narangerel, a total of 146 people who had contact with them have been isolated and treated in local hospitals.
Bubonic plague is a bacterial disease that is spread by fleas that live in wild rodents like groundhogs. It can kill an adult in less than 24 hours if it’s not treated in time, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A couple died of bubonic plague in the western Mongolian province of Bayan-Ulgii last year after eating raw groundhog meat.
The news of the bubonic plague came after Chinese researchers issued an early warning about another possible pandemic caused by an influenza virus in pigs.
Scientists from the Chinese Agricultural University, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other institutes detected a genotype 4 (G4) swine influenza virus, which is contagious among pigs and has the potential to jump into Human, as the G4 virus can bind to human cells, the state-administered Global Times reported last week.
Investigators are concerned that it may mutate further so that it can easily spread from person to person and trigger a global outbreak, the BBC reported.
“Control of the predominant G4 EA H1N1 viruses in pigs and close monitoring in human populations, especially workers in the pig industry, must be implemented urgently,” Chinese researchers said in the document.
The new diseases were reported even as China struggled with the second Covid-19 attack in Beijing after controlling it in Wuhan, where it was first reported in December last year.
On Saturday, Beijing reported a single-digit Covid-19, local authorities said on Sunday.
The number of recently confirmed cases of Covid-19 peaked in Beijing on June 13-14, and then began to decline overall, Xinhua said, citing local officials.
From June 11 to July 4, the city reported 334 confirmed cases of local transmission, 47 percent of which are workers in the Xinfadi wholesale food market, the official said.
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