A female employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East, a laboratory ostensibly dedicated to finding the cures for deadly diseases, reportedly died from “pneumonia of undetermined origin” last week.
Almost 200 people who came into contact with her are now under observation and, while officials in Siberia say there was no evidence of a lab leak, memories of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic loom over the incident.
The U.S. State Department said on Monday that “many details have not been confirmed,” and encouraged Russian officials to “share accurate information quickly and openly.”
“We’re watching and monitoring it closely. I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it, and we’re doing that,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) said it was aware of reports from Irkutsk, but noted that “no cause of death has been officially confirmed” for the unfortunate lab worker.
“Based on unofficial information available, the public health risk to the general population appears to be low,” W.H.O. said. As of Monday morning, the organization had not published a health alert related to Irkutsk.
According to Russian media reports, the victim recently returned from a trip to the Mongolian border, and could have contracted her fatal pneumonia there. Another report claimed she recently took a trip to Thailand.
Some other local media reports said she “dropped a test tube” containing plague bacteria last month while working at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute and became sick afterward, but to date there has been no official confirmation of such an incident occurring.
The woman, who was in her 20s, was receiving treatment at a district hospital in the town of Shelekov near Irkutsk when she died on Friday. She was admitted to the hospital on September 29 with symptoms of severe pneumonia, which could be consistent with a form of the dreaded bubonic plague. Local newspapers identified her as 28-year-old Daria Shipilova.
Two hospitals and a local children’s clinic were placed under quarantine after she died and some reports say the Anti-Plague Institute was also quarantined. Public events in Irkutsk have been canceled, and eyewitnesses claim to have seen people in protective suits moving through the streets of Shelekov.
Another alarming report said agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), successor to the infamous KGB, have been escorting ambulances that were taking the people who came into contact with Shipilova for testing.
Local and regional officials said that no additional infections have been detected over the past ten days. W.H.O. gave assurances that “all of the patient’s contacts have reportedly been identified and are being monitored for illness, and none to date have shown symptoms of illness.”
Russian authorities also said “no microorganisms linked to the employee’s professional activities were detected” in samples taken from her body.
As the U.S. State Department noted, very few details of the case have been confirmed or denied by Russian officials – and both local residents and international observers are reluctant to trust anything Russian officials say about the situation.
The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute was established in 1934 and operates under the supervision of Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian government’s consumer welfare service.
“A special set of measures has been organized and implemented in response to the case of an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East who has been diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown etiology,” Rospotrebnadzor said in a statement on Sunday.
“It is their official statements that should be relied upon, rather than paying heed to various rumors, speculations, and the like. Rospotrebnadzor employs highly qualified professionals in this field, so let us heed their official statements,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.
Western health experts interviewed by various media outlets were guardedly optimistic that the situation in Siberia was under control, if the statements made by Russian officials can be trusted. They noted that additional cases of diseases in the plague family would likely have been reported by now, and while pneumonic plagues can be transmitted between humans, they are spread by airborne respiratory droplets which are not difficult to contain.
Bubonic plague is zoonotic, meaning it is generally spread by animals, notably including rats and fleas. Bubonic plague normally affects the lymphatic system, but it can spread to the lungs and become pneumonic plague, which can become airborne and transmissible between humans.
Some virologists noted it would have been shockingly incompetent for Russian officials to allow the victim to be treated at a public hospital if they suspected she had been exposed to samples of the plague, much less an enhanced or weaponized version created in a laboratory. The last detail Russian officials can be expected to confirm would be whether military or gain-of-function research was being conducted at the Irkutsk institute.
“We may see a few more people get infected, but the chances that this becomes a larger outbreak, let alone a global pandemic, is exceedingly low,” former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told NBC News on Monday.
“If there were weapons programs, biological weapons programs in these labs, that would be much more concerning to me. We need to understand that now,” Jha added.
EuroNews pointed out on Monday that Rospotrebnadzor “has not explained why dozens of staff were isolated and restrictions imposed on several hospitals simultaneously if test results were negative.”