Donald Trump has said the US is looking “very strongly” at a suspected case of plague after the death of a researcher at a remote Siberian lab.
Darya Shipilova, 28, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died on 2 October two days after falling ill following reported exposure to pneumonic plague bacteria. Russia’s public health agency, Rospotrebnadzor, said that her diagnosis was “pneumonia of unknown aetiology”, meaning they cannot confirm what caused it or where it came from.
“I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters yesterday.
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What do we know so far?
It is still unclear exactly how Shipilova became unwell. Local media outlet Liudi Baikala suggested she may have been infected after accidentally breaking a test tube containing pneumonic plague bacteria on 25 September, although this has not been confirmed by Russian authorities. Rospotrebnadzor has said that expanded tests of samples from the patient had found no microorganisms associated with her work. Other reports suggest she contracted the disease on a field trip to a region where plague occurs naturally among wild rodents.
The uncertainty has been compounded by conflicting messages from local politicians and relative silence from Moscow. Alexey Tsydenov, governor of the neighbouring Buryatia region, initially wrote on social media that she had died of plague, before editing his post to add the qualifier “possibly”.
While Rospotrebnadzor has described the “sanitary and epidemiological” situation in the area as stable, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Monday that several hospitals in Irkutsk had been placed under quarantine. Liudi Baikala has reported that nearly 200 contacts of Shipilova have been placed under observation.
How dangerous is pneumonic plague?
Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, and pneumonic plague is the most virulent form of the disease, with an incubation period as short as 24 hours. The World Health Organization has said pneumonic plague is especially contagious because it “can trigger severe epidemics through person-to-person transmission via respiratory particles”.
Symptoms include severe respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath and coughing, often with blood-tainted mucus. Common antibiotics can effectively combat the disease provided they are administered early enough. If left untreated, it can prove fatal within 18 to 24 hours.
This makes any outbreak “potentially very dangerous”, said The Times, but “it is important to distinguish the severity of the disease for an individual person, especially if untreated, from its ability to spread quickly”.
Some US politicians have suggested the incident could be connected to military research into biological warfare. “I remember hearing from anti-Ukraine voices about their so-called bio labs,” Republican congressman Don Bacon, a senior member of the House armed services committee, wrote on social media. “But in reality it is Russia with the bio labs.”
Dr Ashish Jha, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator from 2022 to 2023, told NBC News that if this is an isolated case and no one else dies “it will probably end there”, adding that if there were “biological weapons programmes in these labs, that would be much more concerning to me,” and that “much more” information and transparency was needed from Russian authorities.
Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that it was “possible” that the lab in question might have been studying the pathogen’s potential as a bio-weapon. “Because this is Russia people’s thoughts are running to that”, he said, but added that medical research was still the “more likely” explanation.
