Massive bacteria outbreak as 3,000 infected after leak at vaccine lab in China
THOUSANDS of people in China have been diagnosed with a bacterial infection after a factory leak caused an outbreak.
The National Health Commission of Lanzhou - the capital city of northwest China's Gansu province - said 3,245 people tested positive for brucellosis.
It is also known as Malta fever or Mediterranean fever.
The main symptoms of the disease include a high temperature, loss of appetite, sweating, headaches, tiredness and back and joint pain.
About 22,000 people in the city were tested after a leak "caused by contaminated exhaust from a vaccine factory in Lanzhou", the NHC said.
The leak was reportedly due to the "use of expired disinfectant from late-July to mid-August last year."
Brucellosis is a highly contagious zoonosis which you can catch from unpasteurised milk and cheese.
It is mainly caught by drinking milk that has not been pasteurised or eating dairy products, like cheese and ice cream, made from unpasteurised milk.
Pasteurisation is a process that kills harmful bacteria by heating milk to a specific temperature for a set period.
EXPIRED DISINFECTANT
Brucellosis is extremely rare in the UK and it is very rare to catch it from other people, according to the .
However, there have been outbreaks across the globe in recent decades.
In 2008, an outbreak in Bosnia infected about 1,000 people and resulted in sheep and other infected livestock having to be slaughtered.
Staff at the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute - near the factory where the leak happened - were infected, according to a report released by the Gansu Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in late December.
The NHC said 11 public hospitals in the city offered "free examinations and treatment" in response to the outbreak, reports.
The factory's licence to produce the brucella vaccine was revoked after people in the area contracted the infection.
This week, it emerged that a Chinese virologist who defected to the US has published a report which concludes that Covid-19 was made in a lab.
Dr Li Meng-Yan, who says China's communist regime tried to muzzle whistleblowers in Wuhan last year, has claimed the virus did not naturally occur.
She said it could be "conveniently created" in a laboratory within six months.
Dr Yan is formerly a specialist at Hong Kong's School of Public Health who said her supervisor first asked her to investigate a new "SARS-like" virus in Wuhan on December 31 - but that her efforts were later stifled.
She said she fled to the US after being told she would "be disappeared" if she spoke out.
The researcher has published a scientific paper with other doctors who studied Covid-19’s genetic make-up and concluded it was made up in a lab.
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She said: "SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus."
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The virologist has previously said how she believed it had been made in a laboratory in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
There were 85,223 confirmed coronavirus cases in China and 4,634 deaths.