World health leaders and US officials have urged Russia to provide more information after a 28-year-old laboratory worker linked to plague research died of severe pneumonia in Siberia.
Darya Shipilova, who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, died in hospital in Shelekhov on October 2. Russian authorities have not confirmed that she had pneumonic plague, but are investigating whether the disease was responsible.
The World Health Organisation said it had asked Moscow for details about the illness, the laboratory tests being carried out and the circumstances surrounding the death. It said the risk to the general public currently appeared to be low.
WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said all of the woman’s contacts had been identified and were being monitored, with none showing symptoms. He said Russian officials had told the organisation that tests had found no dangerous infectious pathogens among those contacts.
The WHO said the woman’s illness had initially presented as a typical acute respiratory viral infection. Russian officials later told the organisation that no case of plague had been recorded in Irkutsk.
Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, said it had carried out preventative measures and that the epidemiological situation was stable. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged the public to rely on information from the agency rather than what he described as rumours and speculation.
Reports in Russian media had suggested that Ms Shipilova may have been exposed after breaking a test tube containing plague bacteria. Rospotrebnadzor has denied that an accident took place at the institute and said she died from pneumonia of unknown origin.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Russia to be more transparent, saying the information released so far had been “quite limited”. The US administration is also preparing a formal request for further details, according to US officials.
“Maybe there’s nothing there. Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know,” Mr Rubio said during a news conference in Iceland.
The WHO has not been asked to send experts to Russia, although it has offered support. Its initial assessment put the risk at low for Russia and very low for the wider European region, while investigations into the cause of the death continue.
