The World Health Organization is pushing Russia to explain the death of a young laboratory worker at a plague research institute in Siberia, and to say whether a second employee is now sick.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency has put three questions to Moscow. What caused her pneumonia? What pathogen led authorities to impose containment measures? And are media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of unknown cause true?
Russia has not confirmed the second case, and the reports about it remain unverified.
The woman who died was Daria Shipilova, 28, a laboratory assistant at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. She was hospitalized with severe pneumonia in the town of Shelekhov and died in the early hours of October 2.
Russian outlets, including Lyudi Baikala and the Telegram channel Mash, reported that she died of pneumonic plague. According to Lyudi Baikala, she had broken a test tube containing the plague pathogen on September 25. The hospital's inpatient department was placed under quarantine, and around 200 people who had been in contact with her were put under observation.
The official account shifted over the course of the day. Alexey Tsydenov, the head of neighboring Buryatia, wrote that she had died of plague, then edited his post to say she "may have." Irkutsk Governor Igor Kobzev said her contacts showed no signs of illness and that their lab tests were negative.
Russia has since told WHO, under the International Health Regulations, that no plague case has been registered in the Irkutsk region. It said Shipilova's illness first looked like an ordinary respiratory infection and that tests found no high-threat pathogen linked to her work, either in her samples or among her contacts. Russia's health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, says no laboratory accident involving dangerous organisms was recorded.
Monitoring of her contacts has reportedly ended with no plague found. A few tested positive for COVID-19 or rhinovirus, which has not been tied to her death.
WHO's initial assessment put the risk as low for the general population and very low outside the region.
Russia's last recorded human plague case was in 2016, when a 10-year-old child in the Altai Republic fell ill.
