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Officials have sealed off an isolated town of 10,000 people in rural west-central China after an outbreak of pneumonic plague killed two residents, the state-run Xinhua news service reported on Monday.

An official who answered the emergency line at Renmin Hospital in Ziketan, where the outbreak is centered, said that all roads into and out of the area had been closed off, but that residents remained free to move about within the town. The official, who refused to give his name, said it was unclear when the blockade would be lifted. Repeated calls to a plague emergency phone line produced only busy signals.

Ziketan is a remote, ethnically Tibetan town in eastern Qinghai Province, one of the largest and least populated regions of China. Officials said the first victim, a 32-year-old herdsman, died last Thursday, and the second, a neighbor who also was a herdsman, died on Sunday, more than a day after being admitted to a hospital.

Local health officials told Xinhua that they had quarantined 10 other people, mostly relatives of the dead men, but that none had developed coughs or fever, signs of the deadly disease.

Pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs, is closely related to bubonic plague, the so-called black death that killed scores of millions worldwide in the 1300s. But while bubonic plague is commonly spread by flea bites, the deadlier pneumonic plague bacteria is spread through the air by coughing, and it kills about 6 in 10 sufferers, sometimes within a day, if it is not treated.

The World Health Organization said that the mortality rate could be reduced to about 15 percent through treatment with common antibiotics. A spokeswoman for the agency told Bloomberg News that experts were monitoring the outbreak but were not especially concerned by it.

The various forms of plague are rare, but not unheard of. Most cases occur in Africa, but the United States records about 10 to 15 cases a year, mostly in rural areas.

Source: . nytimes.com