A 28-year-old technician at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute is dead, nearly 200 people are under medical observation, and five hospitals in the region have been reportedly slammed shut for quarantine, while the Kremlin’s health agency insists this is nothing but “pneumonia of unknown origin.”
The Moscow Times identified the dead woman as Darya Shipilova, a laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East.
She was hospitalized in Shelekhov on September 29 with severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator, and died on October 1, overnight into October 2, by some accounts.
The account that set off the alarm: Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube of live Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, while handling samples on September 25. That is four days before she was admitted, DW reported.
Meduza, citing regional media, reported both that version and a competing claim that she fell ill after a trip. Neither has been officially confirmed.
Alexei Tsydenov, head of neighboring Buryatia, went further than Irkutsk officials were willing to go. He publicly said the woman had died of plague, then edited the post to say she “may have” died of it.
Irkutsk’s own governor, Igor Kobzev, would only call it a “particularly dangerous infection” and convene an emergency anti-epidemic commission.
