No major outbreak of epidemic diseases or other public health threats have been reported in quake-stricken areas so far, the Ministry of Health said on Thursday.

The ministry began to use a mobile phone-based epidemic reporting system on Thursday to replace its direct reporting network, which was damaged in the quake.

The ministry also sent 549 epidemic prevention workers to the quake-hit areas in Sichuan Province, which brought the total number of the ministry's health and epidemic prevention workers there to 3,558.

There were another 1,194 health supervisors deployed in the region, according to the ministry.

Figures showed that the ministry and local Sichuan health agencies had dispatched 73,518 workers to conduct disease prevention work in quake-hit villages in Sichuan.

They have entered all the affected villages in Chengdu, Guangyuan and Mianyang, 60 percent of the villages in Deyang, and half of the villages in the hard-hit Wenchuan, Maoxian and Lixian counties in Aba Prefecture.

As of 8:00 AM on Thursday, 3,002 injured people had been sent outside of Sichuan to receive medical treatment, including 1,967 in Chongqing, 249 in Guangdong, 247 in Shaanxi, 242 in Yunnan and 297 in Guizhou, the ministry's statistics showed.

The ministry planned to send another 456 injured people to cities including Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Nanning and Jinan by air on Thursday.

The ministry has shipped 2.45 million milliliters of blood to quake-hit Sichuan and areas where many injured were being treated, including Chongqing and Kunming, as of 10 a.m. on Thursday.

The death toll in China's devastating 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province rose to 51,151 as of 10:00 AM on Thursday, while another 288,431 people were injured and 29,328 were missing, according to the Information Office of the State Council (cabinet).

(Xinhua News Agency May 22, 2008)