According to the White House spokesperson, the U.S. administration is “aware” of what is happening and is “assessing options” for how the situation may develop. The White House declined to comment directly and referred questions to the State Department, which did not respond to the request.
Russian authorities said that on September 29 an employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute was hospitalized with symptoms of severe pneumonia, and on the night of October 1 to 2 she died. Media reports said the case could involve pneumonic plague.
According to one version, the 27-year-old employee returned from a work trip to Buryatia, where a plague outbreak had been recorded on the border with Mongolia. According to another version, she accidentally broke a test tube containing a dangerous bacterium in the laboratory, but Rospotrebnadzor rejected this scenario and said no emergency situations had been identified while working with pathogenic microorganisms.
After that, the Shelekhov hospital was placed under quarantine, and 189 people who had been in contact with the deceased were identified and hospitalized. On October 2, Irkutsk Oblast Governor Igor Kobzev said that the hospitalized patients showed no signs of illness and that the laboratory test results were negative.
On the morning of October 3, the Baikalsk administration urged residents to temporarily avoid traveling to Shelekhov and neighboring settlements because of the plague death case, but later deleted the post. Plague is an acute infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis; its main forms are bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic, and the pneumonic form can be transmitted from person to person through the respiratory tract. According to the WHO, if a patient does not receive antibiotics within the first 24 hours after infection, they die with a 100% probability. The last registered case of plague in Russia was in 2016 in Altai: a 10-year-old boy fell ill then, after butchering a marmot carcass and becoming infected through damaged skin, but he survived thanks to timely treatment.
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