© Vesti.Yamal, Yamal Region
A major operation involving Russia's bio-warfare troops is underway to incinerate at high temperatures the carcasses of the dead infected reindeer.
At least 6 are believed to have the virulent intestinal form of the disease from which one boy has already died.
Today 90 people, including 54 children, are in hospital following the anthrax emergency on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia.
The 20 confirmed cases is a dramatic rise on yesterday's figure of eight.
Numbers of those in hospital also exceed the total of 64 herders and their families who were at the apex of the infection, suggesting that the 'at risk' circle is now wider than the nomads at a camp at Yar-Sale in Yamalski district where the disease was identified.
Russia's chief epidemiologist Lyudmila Volova said today: '20 people of 90 hospitalised have contracted anthrax. Two-thirds of them have the skin form of the disease, which is most straightforward to cure. The others have more complicated intestinal form.'
The medical crisis was caused after reindeer became contaminated with zombie anthrax bacteria which had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost.
Experts say the anthrax was embedded in a human or reindeer corpse, and that unusually hot summer weather in this Arctic location, awoke the deadly infection which had been dormant since at least 1941, when the last outbreak occurred.
Comment: Problem with this being a "once-in-a-hundred-years event" is... the same thing happened in Phoenix, Arizona last month:
Stunning photo and video show a microburst dumping rain and wind over Phoenix, Arizona