An unknown disease has stricken 20 villagers and killed nine of
them in southwest China's Sichuan
Province over the past four weeks, the provincial health
department confirmed Saturday.
A team of experts from the Ministry of Health and Ministry of
Agriculture are in Sichuan to provide medical aid and conduct
epidemiological investigation.
Between June 24 and July 21, three hospitals in the city of
Ziyang received 20 patients with similar symptoms. They all started
with a high fever, fatigue, nausea and vomiting and became comatose
later with bruises under the skin.
By July 21, nine patients had died and one had recovered and
been discharged from hospital. Ten more were still being treated,
six of whom in critical condition, the provincial health department
said.
The patients, 19 men and a woman, are all farmers aged between
30 and 70. They are from 15 villages in Yanjiang and Jianyang and
they all butchered sick pigs or sheep before coming down with the
strange disease, a preliminary investigation has found.
?
But the detected cases are not interrelated and no infection has
been found in any close contact of the patients, the investigators
said.
Medical workers are carrying out laboratory work hoping to
determine the exact cause of the disease, though experts suspect
exposure to the sick, as well as the dead, animals is mainly to
blame.
The local government has ordered all-out efforts to treat the
patients and banned killing of sick pigs and sheep. It also
instructed that animals killed by diseases are disinfected
carefully and buried deep, and that farmers should avoid direct
contact with sick or dead animals.
(Xinhua News Agency July 24, 2005)