The White House is “aware” of a suspected plague outbreak in Russia and is “monitoring the situation” after a young lab worker was killed and some 200 others reportedly forced into quarantine, an official said.
Daria Shipilova, a 28-year-old researcher at an anti-plague research institute in Russia’s eastern Irkutsk region, reportedly died after breaking a test tube containing the plague pathogen, although Russian officials have refused to say whether or not she contracted the disease.
The Trump administration “is aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options,” an official told Axios.
Shipilova was hospitalized in Shelekhov on Tuesday with symptoms of severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator and then died Thursday, according to reports.
Authorities additionally quarantined an entire hospital and placed scores of people who had come into contact with her under medical observation. However, none of the identified contacts showed symptoms, and their test results have come back negative.
Regional Gov. Igor Kobzev declined to identify the illness, referring to it only as “a dangerous infectious disease” but canceled all public events in the region.
Russia’s public health agency, meanwhile, only said Shipilova had “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and that further testing found no microorganisms linked to her work, according to Axios. Agency officials said that the situation in the region is stable.
Shipilova, who fell ill while on an expedition with other researchers near Russia’s eastern border with Mongolia, reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing, according to news outlet Lyudi Baikala.
Anna Popova, who heads Russia’s public-health watchdog, rushed 2,600 miles from Moscow to the Irkutsk region after receiving news of the infection as fears spread that this could be a similar situation to COVID-19, which is widely believed to have started at a disease research lab in Wuhan, China.
Popova has not publicly commented on the reported outbreak, but senior Russian epidemiologist Mikhal Favorov was not convinced of the broken test tube story, calling it evidence of a possible cover-up, according to The Moscow Times.
“It’s laughable,” said Favorov. “Someone working at the anti-plague Institute in Irkutsk wears a protective anti-plague suit. If you break a test tub, the likelihood of infection is actually very low. In short, It doesn’t matter to the general public — they’ll believe the ‘dropped test tube story.’”
