Beijing – A 15-year-old boy died in western Mongolia of bubonic plague, the country’s national news agency reported. The Health Ministry said laboratory tests confirmed that the teenager died of the plague he contracted from an infected groundhog, according to the Montsame News Agency.
Becky Bohrer / AP
The case led the government to impose a quarantine in a part of the Gobi-Altai province. Montsame said 15 people who had contact with the boy were isolated.
In an unrelated case in neighboring China, a plague-infected patient in the northern region of Inner Mongolia is improving, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency.
Xinhua said 15 people who had close contact with the patient were released from quarantine on Sunday. The agency said the government ended its high-level emergency response.
A previous official announcement said that a warning to the public in the Bayannur region of Inner Mongolia to avoid eating groundhog and reporting dead animals would last until the end of 2020.
China has largely eradicated the plague, but occasional cases are still reported, especially among hunters who come into contact with fleas carrying the bacteria. The last major known outbreak was in 2009, when several people died in the city of Ziketan, in Qinghai province, on the Tibetan plateau.
With coronavirusFirst detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, China has dealt with African swine fever, which has devastated pig herds for the past year.
China has gone weeks without reporting a new death from the coronavirus.
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