A 15-year-old boy died of bubonic plague in western Mongolia after eating an infected groundhog, the country’s health ministry said.
Two other teens who also ate groundhog were being treated with antibiotics, a ministry spokesman, Narangerel Dorj said.
The government imposed a quarantine in an area of the Gobi-Altai province, where the cases occurred. The health ministry said 15 people who had contact with the boy were quarantined and received antibiotics.
The plague is found in groundhogs, large rodents that live in burrows in the vast grasslands of North Asia, and some other wildlife in parts of Mongolia, northwest China, and eastern Russia.
The Mongolian government warned the public not to hunt or eat groundhogs.
In 2019, Mongolia imposed a six-day quarantine in its westernmost Bayan-Ulgii province, which borders Russia and China, after an ethnic Kazakh couple died of plague after eating raw groundhog.
In an unrelated case, a plague-infected patient in the northern China 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 had ended its high-level emergency response.
An earlier official announcement said a warning to the public in the Bayannur region of Inner Mongolia to avoid eating groundhog and report that dead animals will remain in place until the end of 2020.
