AFP via Getty ImagesUS Secretary of State Marco Rubio has urged Russia to release more information about the death of a lab worker at a plague research centre in Siberia.
The incident has sparked a flurry of speculation about the circumstances in which the 28-year-old woman died.
Russian officials have said they are still investigating the cause of the death but those who came into contact with the victim all tested negative to pneumonic plague.
“I think it’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Rubio told reporters. “We’re watching it very closely, hour by hour.”
Reports first emerged on Friday of almost 200 people being placed under observation in Siberia’s Irkutsk region following the death.
The lab worker, named in Russian media as Darya Shipilova, had reportedly fallen ill a couple of days earlier.
Unconfirmed reports suggested that she had become ill after breaking a test tube containing the pathogen or following a field trip to a region where plague occurs naturally among wild rodents.
But Russian officials have played down those reports. The country’s health watchdog Rospotrebnadzor said the woman had died of “pneumonia of an undetermined etiology”.
In a statement read out by World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier on Tuesday, Russia – which has a duty under global health rules to report outbreaks to the WHO – said: “No case of this dangerous disease has been recorded in the city of Irkutsk.”
The statement added: “All of the patients’ contacts have been reportedly been identified and are being monitored for illness, and none to date have shown symptoms of illness.”
On Tuesday, the ongoing speculation sparked a back and forth between Russia and the United States, with questions about a possible spread outside of Russia.
Speaking during a trip to Iceland, Marco Rubio said the US had “measures” available to help Russia if the situation turned out to be more serious than claimed.
Rospotrebnadzor hit back with an offer of help to the the United States. “The Russian Federation is ready to assist the US in combating infectious disease outbreaks,” it said in a statement.
Rubio’s comments were echoed by US President Donald Trump, who said he was looking “very strongly” at the case, saying.
According to the Washington Post, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state department, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response are working on the US response.
‘Disease not detected’
Asked about the death following Rubio’s remarks, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov cited the findings by Rospotrebnadzor.
Asked about the offer of help from the United States, he said it was a “good thing when mutual assistance is offered”.
Also on Tuesday, Rospotrebnadzor issued a statement aimed at quelling speculation in a document circulating online about special anti-plague measures allegedly put in place.
“We wish to clarify that the document and information in question do not originate from official sources and are untrue,” it said on Telegram.
The plague bacterium or Yersinia pestis, which killed up to half the population of Europe in the 14th Century when it was known as the Black Death, is found among rodents such as marmots in the area.
It was in response to an outbreak in the 1920s that the Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East, external was founded just more than 100 years ago.
Dr Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that the pneumonic version of Yersinia pestis was nearly always fatal if left untreated, but could be overcome with antibiotics.
“Pneumonic plague can transmit from person to person and that is why there is the concern around this,” he said.
He added: “But of course people’s thought with any outbreak of infectious disease at all runs to… lockdowns and Covid and that is just not what’s going to happen here.”
“People think, ‘Oh the plague, that’s gone, that went hundreds of years ago,’ but it hasn’t,” Clarke said.
“It’s a threat to human health and that’s why they need to study it.”
