The New York Times takes note: Pneumonic Plague Is Diagnosed in China. Excerpt and then a comment:
BEIJING — Two people in China were diagnosed with plague, setting off a panic on Tuesday about the potential spread of the highly infectious and fatal disease and prompting China’s government to warn citizens to take precautions to protect themselves.
Beijing officials said the two infected people came from Inner Mongolia, a sparsely populated region of northern China. They sought treatment on Tuesday in a hospital in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, where they were diagnosed with pneumonic plague, according to the government office of the district.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Weibo, the microblogging site, that there was no need for Beijing residents to panic and that the risks of further transmission are “extremely low.” The authorities quickly isolated the patients, conducted epidemiological investigations on the people who could have been exposed and disinfected all the relevant sites, the CDC said. They have also strengthened monitoring of patients with fever, it added.
Pneumonic plague is one of three types of infectious disease known as plague caused by the same bacterium, Yersinia pestis. Patients diagnosed with pneumonic plague, which causes high fevers and shortness of breath, sometimes first contract the closely related and more well-known disease, bubonic plague.
Fears are mounting in China over a possible outbreak of the disease, once known as the Black Death, which killed tens of millions of people in medieval Europe, and spread through Asia and Africa.
Last month, the authorities in China said they would strengthen quarantine measures to prevent plague from entering the country after Madagascar was struck by a fast-spreading outbreak of the disease. It is unclear when the cases were first detected in China but residents are asking why the authorities took so long to diagnose and disclose the problem.
Li Jifeng, a doctor at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital where the two people sought treatment, wrote on WeChat, a social media platform, that the patients sought treatment on Nov. 3. That post, which has since been deleted, was published by CN-Healthcare, a website that covers health care news in China. Dr. Li could not be reached for comment and Beijing Chaoyang Hospital declined to comment.
Dr. Li wrote that the patient she saw was a middle-aged man, who had a fever and complained of breathing difficulties for 10 days. He sought treatment at a hospital in Inner Mongolia but his condition did not improve. His wife also developed a fever and respiratory problems.
“After so many years of specialist training, I’m familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of most respiratory diseases,” wrote Dr. Li. “But this time, I looked and looked at it. I couldn’t guess what pathogen caused this pneumonia. I only knew it was rare.”
On why the authorities took so long to make the announcement, Dr. Li wrote that signs of any infectious disease need to be repeatedly verified and investigated, and such announcements cannot be “transmitted casually.”
The police quarantined the emergency room in the Chaoyang Hospital on Monday night, the news outlet Caixin reported, citing residents.
On Tuesday, Chinese censors instructed online news aggregators in China to “block and control” online discussion related to news about the plague, according to a directive seen by The New York Times.
Skeptical Chinese internet users have charged the government with being slow to disclose news about the disease, which is transmitted between humans and kills even faster than the more-common bubonic form. China has a history of covering up and being slow to announce infectious outbreaks, prompting many people to call for transparency this time.
“The plague is not the most terrifying part,” one user wrote on Weibo. “What’s even scarier is the information not being made public.”
China took a deserved kicking for its suppression of SARS news, and when H7N9 avian flu suddenly appeared in Shanghai and spread across the country, the authorities almost drowned us with information—not only news reports, but research articles that made Saudi MERS studies look as pathetic as they were.
Somehow those reports dried up not long after the accession of Xi Jinping, and health problems in a nation of over 1 billion mysteriously solve themselves these days.
Pneumonic plague, serious as it is for the unlucky person who contracts it, is a very small problem in a large and prosperous country. (It's been endemic in US Southwest since the San Francisco plague outbreak of 1900. And antibiotics routinely beat it.) Plague in China deserves coverage as a one-off, and the Chinese authorities would look a lot better if they'd reported these cases as an interesting oddity: "in other news..."
