The death toll from an outbreak of pneumonic plague in northwest China has risen to three, state media reported Tuesday as authorities maintained a quarantine lockdown on a town of 10,000.
The latest victim was a 64-year-old man who died Monday in Ziketan, a remote town in a Tibetan area of Qinghai province where two fatalities had previously been reported, the Global Times said.
At least nine other people were infected with the highly virulent disease, mostly relatives of the first fatality, a 32-year-old herdsman, reports said, quoting local health authorities.
Qinghai provincial health authorities refused to comment when contacted by AFP.
Ziketan, which is about 200 kilometers (125 miles) southwest of the provincial capital Xining, had enough supplies to get by on its own for the time being, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Health authorities were urging people who had visited Ziketan on or after July 16 to seek immediate help if they developed coughing or fever.
Medical staff were disinfecting the region and tracking down people who had been in close contact with the patients but there had been no reports of new infections, Xinhua said.
The vast high-altitude area is sparsely inhabited, mainly by Tibetan herders.
Pneumonic plague spreads through the air, making it easier to contract than bubonic plague, which requires that a person is bitten by an infected flea.
Russia meanwhile will boost monitoring at its border with China, Russia’s top sanitary doctor said Monday.
"Control over people crossing this border will be stepped up, including both Chinese and Russian nationals," Gennady Onishchenko said as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency, adding that the region was fairly remote.