It became known exactly how a 10-year-old boy contracted the bubonic plague in Altai. This incident was reported on July 13. Then, in addition to the sick child himself, 17 people with whom he had contact were placed in the isolation ward.
Earlier it was assumed that he could have been infected by marmots. This was confirmed a week later by the boy himself. He said that he was staying at a distant livestock camp in the Kosh-Agach district and helped his grandfather butcher a marmot.
“I was holding the groundhog by the legs when my grandfather was removing the skin,” the Rospotrebnadzor department in the Altai Republic quotes the boy as saying.
It turned out that shortly before that, the child had injured his left arm, and the infection had entered the body through an unhealed wound.
A few days later, the boy's temperature rose to almost 40 degrees, and a lymph node enlarged in the armpit.
The diagnosis of "suspicion of bubonic plague" was made by the paramedic of the ambulance who came to the call, reports the portal "Novosti Gorny Altai".
At the same time, the department of Rospotrebnadzor reported that the child's family knew about the ban on marmot hunting. When examining the places where the child had been before he fell ill with the plague, they found traps for catching marmots, and at home in the refrigerator lay "skillfully cut" carcasses of marmots.