The police have cordoned off a town in northwestern China after a man there died from a case of the plague.

State television footage on Tuesday showed the police in Yumen, Gansu Province, setting up roadblocks and laying down tire-piercing spikes along the main roads leading to the center of the town of 30,000, while local officials were shown stockpiling sacks of rice and jugs of cooking oil, as well as boxes of 3M face masks.

Provincial health officials said a man died in Yumen on July 16 from a confirmed case of pneumonic plague after having come in contact with a Himalayan marmot, a rodent similar to a groundhog, which is known in China to carry the fleas that spread the disease.

While plague transmitted from the fleas of animals to humans tends to be less dangerous, the Yumen man’s infection had spread to his lungs, meaning it had developed into pneumonic plague, according to the state news media, which quoted the deputy director of the Gansu provincial health department. Pneumonic plague is more contagious and deadly, commonly spreading from human to human in droplets expelled when coughing.

In addition to the measures to prevent people from entering or leaving Yumen, 151 people, including those who had been in recent contact with the victim, have been quarantined and kept under observation in the past week, but so far none have shown symptoms of plague.

On Wednesday, a woman who answered the telephone at the Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Jiuquan, the Gansu city with jurisdiction over Yumen, confirmed that the roadblocks and quarantine measures remained in place.

Earlier reports indicated that the quarantines were to be implemented for nine days, meaning that this Thursday would be the last day for most of those under observation. “Everything is pretty stable so far,” said the woman at the disease control center, who declined to give her name. “No sign of infection on them.”

State television on Tuesday showed health workers dressed from head to toe in white anticontamination suits, including face masks, gloves and goggles, walking around the streets of Yumen and spraying what appeared to be disinfectant from large bottles carried on their backs.

The plague is a bacterial infection that killed millions of people across Europe in the 1300s in an outbreak known as the Black Death. Today the disease is generally treatable with antibiotics, and outbreaks among humans are infrequent.

Individual cases tend to occur in arid climates, including in the American Southwest, where states including Colorado and New Mexico occasionally see human cases of plague in people who have come in contact with wild rodents, such as prairie dogs.

About 1,000 human cases of plague occurred in the United States between 1900 and 2010, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, about 1,000 to 2,000 human cases of plague are reported to the World Health Organization each year, with outbreaks tending to be more common and larger in Africa.

In China, plague cases tend to occur in the arid Loess Plateau in the country’s northwest. In 2009, an outbreak of plague in Qinghai Province, which shares a border with Gansu, caused at least three deaths and prompted the authorities to close off a town and implement strict quarantine measures.

In addition to the Himalayan marmot, which is roughly the size of a big house cat and is common along the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Alashan ground squirrel is also known in China to carry fleas that can cause the plague.