Last week, a 28-year-old employee at an anti-plague institute in the Siberian city of Irkutsk died at a regional hospital just two days after mysteriously falling ill.
Her unusual occupation drew an international media frenzy, sparking fears over another pandemic. The news sounded just a bit too much like the opening to a cheesy medical horror movie, with US secretary of state Marco Rubio saying that the US is “watching and monitoring” the case “closely.”
Former White House COVID-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx called the death “particularly concerning,” saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are “very much aware and tracking” the situation.
And something about Russian officials’ reassurances hasn’t quite quelled our fears. The deceased worker, Darya Shipilova, was diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology,” per the Moscow Times — a vague diagnosis that left plenty of questions unanswered.
It’s especially unsettling considering the lab has been studying the pneumonic plague, which develops when “bacteria spread to the lungs of a patient with untreated bubonic or septicemic plague, or when a person inhales infectious droplets coughed out by another person or animal with pneumonic plague,” per the CDC.
The Black Death, a global 14th century pandemic that’s believed to have killed tens of millions of people, included all three forms of plague: bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic.
There have been recent outbreaks of pneumonic plague in Madagascar, but there are no known cases of the country exporting plague cases to other countries.
Russian head of the republic of the neighboring Siberian region Buryatia Alexei Tsydenov at first threw fuel on the fire by claiming in a Telegram post that Shipilova had died of the plague — before adding the word “maybe” to his statement.
Many say there’s no reason to panic. Consumer safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said it found no evidence that any lab materials had anything to do with the tragic death and that were no signs of foul play or security breaches. Intriguingly, the watchdog confirmed that contact tracing revealed two cases of COVID-19 and two cases of rhinovirus, according to the Moscow Times — but no plague.
The World Health Organization has since publicly stated that the risk of an epidemic in Russia is low. Spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said in a statement today that “all of the patients’ contacts have reportedly been identified and are being monitored for illness, and none to date have shown symptoms of illness.”
The lab at the institute where Shipilova was employed is currently under lockdown, including 60 of her colleagues, forcing them to sleep on the floors and in chairs.
Characteristically, president Donald Trump appeared to have received some serious mixed messaging from his aides — or struggled to interpret the details for himself.
“I hate to see them having it,” he said, seemingly implying the existence of a plague outbreak in Russia, one of the United States’ biggest adversaries. “We’ll help. Everybody who has that kind of a problem, we’ll always help.”
More on the plague: Experts Confirm Outbreaks of Black Death, Brain-Eating Amoeba
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