In Kyrgyzstan, four people were hospitalised and another 160 quarantined after fears of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the country. This after the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Health, Wednesday, stated a 15-year-old boy died due to bubonic plague last week.

Media reports said doctors believe that the 15-year-old Temir Issakunov, a herder, died after being bitten by an infected flea. He was herding cattle in a remote village in the northeast of Kyrgyzstan.

Earlier reports from this mountainous country in central Asia said that the teenager died after eating a barbecued marmot, which is a large mountainous ground squirrel, while on a camping trip. However, the latest report said the news was false. The real cause of the boy's death was revealed only after tests were done on his body and showed the reason to be bubonic plague.

Following fears of the outbreak of bubonic plague, the Health Ministry, issued an alert and established quarantine facilities in parts of the mountainous northeast where the boy resided. However, ministry officials pointed out that there was no risk of an epidemic.

Meanwhile, four residents from the boy's village were admitted to the hospital on Wednesday after they complained of high fever. However, none of the patients had any contact with the boy who died last week. Although, patients of bubonic plague complain of such symptoms, high fever was also a common symptom of many other diseases, such as flu or measles.

Bubonic plague is the most common type of plague and causes painful swollen lymph nodes called bubos. Known as the Black Death, bubonic plague killed between 75 and 200 million people in the Middle Ages. The pandemic in Europe in the 1340s and 1350s was considered among the most devastating diseases to have struck human history. It was known to have left between 30 and 60 percent of the continent's total population dead.

The disease is now rare and can be easily treated with antibiotics. Although, cases of plague have been reported from across Africa, Asia, and South America, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that most human cases since the 1990s have occurred in Africa. Accordingly to the WHO almost all of the cases reported in the last 20 years have occurred among people living in small towns and villages or agricultural areas rather than in larger towns and cities.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 cases each year are reported, however the WHO believes that the actual number could be much higher as, relatively few cases are reliably diagnosed and reported to health authorities. The world health body, cites mortality rates of 8-10% whereas some other studies have predicted that the death rates due to plague could be higher.

People usually catch the disease after being bitten by an infected insect or animal or coming into close contact with someone infected.