Beware travelers: There’s an “explosion” of rabies in China.

That determination is from the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, and anybody traveling in rural China, particularly in the south, should take heed.

The incidence of human rabies cases has spiked this decade from a very low level in the 1990s, and it has spread over much of the country.

A comment on a blog post earlier this week piqued my curiosity. Moreover, my personal physician in Beijing a few months ago strongly encouraged me to get a rabies vaccine (which I haven’t done yet). So I did a little poking around. Turns out that a study released in mid-2008 documents how much rabies has spread. Click here and here.

In 1996, China tallied 159 human rabies cases. By 2006, the number had soared to 3,279.

Rabies, a viral infection of the nervous system transmitted by animal bites, has a nearly 100 percent death rate. Those bitten by rabid animals must get painful injections of rabies antibodies within 24 hours after suffering the bite to survive. That’s not an easy thing to do if you are in the rural backwaters of Guangxi or Guizhou.

If you want to get a visual sense of how the incidence of rabies has spread in China, click here for a purported CDC document (it’s from Wikileaks so I can’t verify authenticity). Scroll part way down to see a series of maps of China showing the counties with incidences of human rabies from 1999 to 2007. It looks like a spreading wildfire.