Beijing: Twenty four people died in an eastern China province this year after suffering from viral hemorrhagic fever that spreads through rats, figures released by the provincial health bureau said on Saturday.
Among the 24 deaths reported from Shandong, 13 were in Qingdao, a port city in the province. Most of the cases were recorded after October, it said, adding that the number of deaths are 11 more than last year.
The bureau recorded a total 938 viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) infections this year, which is 1.88 per cent lower than that of 2010, Xinhua reported.
Fan Tianli, a doctor at the Qingdao Hospital of Infectious Diseases, said the VHF patients were from rural areas.
They could have been infected following direct contact with rats that were carriers of the virus, ate food contaminated by them, or been stung by mites that had also bitten rats, he said.
Inoculation camps in affected areas have been organised by the provincial health bureau to curb the disease and rat extermination drives are being undertaken.
Since 2008, 1.5 million people in Shandong have received VHF vaccine inoculations to plug the mass spread of the disease characterised by fever and bleeding disorders.
Outbreaks of VHF had been reported in the 1980s and 1990s in the province when more than 10,000 people were infected on average each year, but the exact number of deaths is unrecorded, state-run Xinhua reported.
Disease control experts say the epidemic generally breaks out in winter and spring seasons when rats face shortage of food in the wild and turn to rural homes and garbage heaps.
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