Taiwan reports first case of chikungunya virus from China outbreak
Chikungunya has swept through southern China in recent weeks, primarily in the manufacturing hub of Foshan on the Pearl River Delta, with cases rising to more than 8,000, marking the largest outbreak ever recorded in the country, according to Roger Hewson, virus surveillance lead at the United Kingdom's Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Friday that the chikungunya virus was detected in a Taiwanese woman who had travelled to Foshan and returned to Taiwan on July 30. It was the first case of its kind detected so far in 2025, though more than a dozen cases have been previously detected and originated in Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
The CDC has raised its travel advisory for China's Guangdong province, the epicentre of the outbreak, to level 2 out of 3, urging travellers to use 'enhanced precautions'.
The virus can lead to high fever, rash, headache, nausea and fatigue lasting up to seven days, and muscle and joint pain that can last for several weeks.
'The outbreak in Foshan and surrounding areas of Guangdong province has unfolded rapidly and at a scale unprecedented for China,' Hewson said in a statement.
The surge is due to limited immunity in China and 'environmental suitability' for the virus-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, which breed in stagnant water, he said.
Chinese health authorities have responded with containment strategies ranging from household-level inspections and enforced bed nets, to drone-based fogging and even quarantines, reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hewson said.
The Associated Press news agency reported that residents of Foshan can be fined as much as up to 10,000 RMB ($1,400) for keeping water in outdoor containers – a popular breeding ground for mosquitoes.
The outbreak follows more than a month of typhoons and heavier-than-usual monsoon rains in China.
Last week, Hong Kong – located some 180km (289 miles) from Foshan – was hit by its worst August rainstorm since records began in 1884.
Chinese state media said despite the historic number of chikungunya cases, the outbreak appears to have finally peaked.
Foshan reported 2,892 local infections from July 27 to August 2, but no severe or fatal cases, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.
'The recent surge has been initially contained, with a downward trend in newly reported cases across the province,' Kang Min, director of the infectious disease control institute at the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told Xinhua.
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The foundation also used satellite images to identify what it said are another 26 rare earth mines inside the UWSA's enclave next to China. All but three of those mines were built over the past few years, and many are located at the headwaters of the Loei River, yet another tributary of the Mekong. Researchers who have studied Myanmar's rare earth mining industry say the large, round mineral collection pools visible in the satellite images give the sites away as rare earth mines. The Shan Human Rights Foundation says villagers living near the new mines in Shan state have also told how workers there are scooping up a pasty white powder from the collection pools, just as they have seen in online videos of the rare earth mines further north in Kachin. 'Zero environmental monitoring' Patrick Meehan, a lecturer at the University of Manchester in the UK who has studied Myanmar's rare earth mines, said reports emerging from Shan state fit with what he knows of similar operations in Kachin. 'The way companies tend to operate in Myanmar is that there is zero pre-mining environmental assessment, zero environmental monitoring, and there are none of those sorts of regulations or protections in place,' Meehan said. The leaching process being used involves pumping chemicals into the hillsides to draw the rare earth metals out of the rock. That watery mixture of chemicals and minerals is then pumped out of the ground and into the collection pools, where the rare earths are then separated and gathered up. Without careful attention to keeping everything contained at a mine, said Meehan, the risks of contaminating local rivers and groundwater could be high. Rare earth mines are situated close to rivers because of the large volumes of water needed for pumping the extractive chemicals into the hills, he said. The contaminated water is then often pumped back into the river, he added, while the groundwater polluted by the leaching can end up in the river as well. 'There is definitely scope for that,' said Meehan. He and others have tracked the effect such mines have already had in Kachin – where hundreds of mining sites now dot the state's border with China – from once-teeming streams now barren of fish to rice stalks yielding fewer grains and livestock falling ill and dying after drinking from local creeks. In a 2024 report, the environmental group Global Witness called the fallout from Kachin's mining boom 'devastating'. Ben Hardman, Mekong legal director for the US advocacy group EarthRights International, said locals in Kachin have also told his team about mineworkers dying in unusually high numbers. The worry now, he adds, is that Shan state and the neighbouring countries into which Myanmar's rivers flow will suffer the same fate as has Kachin, especially if the mine sites continue to multiply as global demand for rare earth minerals grows. 'There's a long history of rare earth mining causing serious environmental harms that are very long-term, and with pretty egregious health implications for communities,' Hardman said. 'That was the case in China in the 2010s, and is the case in Kachin now. And it's the same situation now evolving in Shan state, and so we can expect to see the same harms,' he added. 'You need to stop it at the source' Most, if not all, of the rare earths mined in Myanmar are sent to China to be refined, processed, and either exported or put to use in a range of green-energy and, increasingly, military hardware. But, unlike China, neither Myanmar, Laos nor Thailand have the sophisticated processing plants that can transform raw ore into valuable material, according to SFA (Oxford), a critical minerals and metals consulting firm. The Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a local think tank, says Chinese customs data also show that Myanmar has been China's main source of rare earths from abroad since at least 2017, including a record $1.4bn-worth in 2023. Myanmar's exports of rare earth minerals were growing at the same time as China was placing tough new curbs on mining them at home, after witnessing the environmental damage it was doing to its own communities. Buying the minerals from Myanmar has allowed China to outsource much of the problem. That is why many are blaming not only the mine operators and the UWSA for the environmental fallout from Myanmar's mines, but China. The UWSA could not be reached for comment, and neither China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor its embassy in Myanmar replied to Al Jazeera's emails seeking a response. In a June 8 Facebook post, reacting to reports of Chinese-run mines in Myanmar allegedly polluting Thai rivers, the Chinese embassy in Thailand said all Chinese companies operating abroad had to follow local laws and regulations. The embassy also said China was open to cooperating with Mekong River countries to protect the local environment, but gave no details on what that might entail. Thailand has said it is working with both China and Myanmar to solve the problem. In a bid to tackle the problem, though, the Thai government has proposed building dams along the affected rivers in Chiang Rai province to filter their waters for pollutants. Local politicians and environmentalists question whether such dams would work. International Rivers' Pianporn Deetes said there was no known precedent of dams working in such a manner in rivers on the scale of the Mekong and its tributaries. 'If it's [a] limited area, a small creek or in a faraway standalone mining area, it could work. It's not going to work with this international river,' she said. Naresuan University's Tanapon said he was building computer models to study whether a series of cascading weirs – small, dam-like barriers that are built across a river to control water flow – could help. But he, too, said such efforts would only mitigate the problem at best. Dams and weirs, Tanapon said, 'can just slow down or reduce the impact'. 'You need to stop it at the source,' he added.
