BEIJING—A 15-year-old boy has died in western Mongolia of bubonic plague after eating an infected marmot, the country’s health ministry announced.
Two other teenagers who also ate the marmot were being treated with antibiotics, ministry spokesperson Narangerel Dorj said.
The government imposed a quarantine on a portion of Gobi-Altai province, where the cases occurred. The health ministry said 15 people who had contact with the boy who died were quarantined and are receiving antibiotics.
Plague is found in marmots, large rodents that live in burrows in the sprawling North Asian grassland, and some other wild animals in parts of Mongolia, northwestern China, and eastern Russia.
The Mongolian government warned the public not to hunt or eat marmots.
In an unrelated case, a patient who was infected with plague in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia is improving, according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency.
An official announcement earlier said a warning for the public in the Bayannur region of Inner Mongolia to avoid eating marmot and to report dead animals would last through the end of 2020.
The plague is caused by bacteria transmitted via flea bites and infected animals. During the Black Death in the Middle Ages, some 50 million people in Europe died from the plague over a several-decade span of time.
The bubonic plague is one of the three forms of the disease. It causes fever, coughing, chills, and swollen lymph nodes.
Some experts said reports of the plague in China don’t mean that it will spread across the world like the COVID-19 disease, which is caused by the novel coronavirus and emerged late last year in Wuhan, China, spreading across the world and reportedly infecting more than 10 million people.
“Bubonic plague is a thoroughly unpleasant disease and this case will be of concern locally within Inner Mongolia,” said Dr. Michael Head, a researcher at the UK’s University of Southampton, according to the Daily Mail.
He added, “However, it is not going to become a global threat like we have seen with COVID-19. Bubonic plague is transmitted via the bite of infected fleas, and human to human transmission is very rare.”
Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
