Recently, the China Center for the Control of Animal Diseases published a pamphlet on the prevention of animal diseases, advising people not to cut, eat, sell or transport dead animals. All animal carcasses must be sterilized and buried at least 2 meters deep, it said.

It also advised local authorities to closely monitor the situation, strictly control and supervise animal breeding, butchering, processing, transport and storage, and severely punish the trading of dead animals.

In the chatrooms of many Chinese websites, netizens are calling for the government to take immediate action to prevent possible epidemic diseases, while persuading people, mostly volunteers, to stop flooding into the affected areas from other parts of the country.

To make way for the upcoming large-scale disease-prevention efforts, military rescuers have began relocating local residents, mostly villagers, away from their homes in the worst-hit areas.

On Wednesday, a 3,200-person detachment of the Chinese People's Armed Police resettled 4,149 villagers from the remote areas of Wenchuan. According to military sources, soldiers searched the villagers' homes door to door, to ensure that no one was left behind in the affected villages, which will be completely sterilized in the coming days.

As of noon of Wednesday, the death toll from the quake had reached 41,353 nationwide, while 274,683 people were injured and 32,666 still missing.

It was even more powerful than the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 in terms of scope and intensity, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said during his inspection of the quake-hit areas in Sichuan.

Measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, the catastrophe in Tangshan of north China's Hebei Province claimed about 240,000.

(Xinhua News Agency May 22, 2008)