Russia will boost monitoring at its border with China following an outbreak of pneumonic plague in a neighboring north-western region, 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.
Ziketan town in Qinghai province was put under collective quarantine Saturday when laboratory tests showed it had been struck by the highly virulent disease, the Qinghai health bureau said in a statement.
Ziketan, which is located in the Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, had enough supplies to get by on its own for the time being, the health bureau statement said, giving no indication of when the quarantine would be lifted.
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.
It is also more lethal, with a fatality rate of up to 100 percent if left untreated, compared with 60 percent for bubonic plague.
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